Simone Weil: Suffering,Attention and Compassionate Thought

Introduction: ‘Taking Suffering Seriously’

The experience of suffering, in oneself or another, demands attention, and compassion could well be understood as attentiveness to suffering. ¹ In many cases it might be said that the attention suffering demands is very simple: relief from pain, hunger, loneliness or fear. Before it is anything else, compassion must be food, water, proximity or relief. But the way in which suffering may be given intellectual attention is far less obvious. Simone Weil’s later work, contained in short essays and fragments kept in notebooks, is one attempt to pay attention to the experience of suffering, and to form thought out of the experience. It is a sometimes brilliant, frequently paradoxical body of work, and the interaction between suffering, compassion and attention is one of the most crucial threads running through it; the struggle to speak of suffering meaningfully while continuing to pay attention honestly. My primary concern here is with the way that Weil links compassion with belief, or intellectual life more generally. The issues I am trying to uncover seem to me to be relevant not simply to the question of how to interpret Weil’s life and work but, perhaps more importantly, to the question of what a theological response to human suffering can or should look like.

Even more specifically, the issues I intend to explore are relevant to an area of debate on the fringes of contemporary philosophy of religion. One important strand in discussions of ‘the problem of evil’ in recent years has been the ‘anti-theodicies’ put forward most notably by Kenneth Surin, Terrence Tilley and D. Z. Phillips, whose conclusions and the assumptions they proceed from seem to be fairly widely shared, such that it is not uncommon to encounter the view that there is something morally problematic with the very project of theodicy. ² There are a number of arguments and perspectives, which may not always sit entirely comfortably together, but for the sake of simplicity I will assume that Nick Trakakis’s summary expresses the heart of the matter well enough: that ‘the theodicist’s way of proceeding evinces a failure to take suffering seriously’. ³ The ‘moral argument against theodicy’ now has a place alongside the ‘evidential argument from evil’. ⁴

There is not the space in this discussion for a thorough exploration of these arguments, but I do want to use the central issue at stake in these debates as a starting point for an exploration of Weil’s thought. If the central problem that has been found in a great many forms of ‘theodicy’ is the ‘failure to take suffering seriously’, it seems important to ask what it actually means to take suffering seriously. How is such seriousness manifested, or recognised? Of course, it is usually quite easy to take one’s own suffering, the suffering of those one loves, or suffering one witnesses first-hand seriously. But what does it mean to take suffering as such ‘seriously’?

That this is a crucial issue can be illustrated through one of the discussions included in the second edition of Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy, ⁵ an influential collection of reflections on the problem of evil from both philosophers and theologians. Stephen T. Davis’s chapter on the ‘free will defence’ makes use of a fairly trivial example (concerning an embarrassing episode from his youth) to illustrate the way in which genuinely upsetting experiences may later be recalled without any suffering. This example is meant to show that it is coherent, at least, to say that a future state of wholeness or harmony can change the way in which one assesses the significance of a traumatic experience. In response, John K. Roth argues that in comparing relatively trivial examples with horrific instances such as the Holocaust, one ‘comes dangerously close to’ trivialising human suffering. In fact, the lack of recognition involved in such comparisons can be interpreted as a ‘soft denial’ of the existence of such evil. Davis, in response, claims that he in no way fails to recognise the enormity of such crimes, but just has a different philosophical assessment of the bearing they have upon the reasonability of claims about the eschaton, and the ‘reasons’ that God may have for allowing such things. It is assumed, then, that moral sensibility and theoretical reasoning are distinct and separable. In his book The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God, D. Z. Phillips takes issue with this assumption, and questions whether argumentative moves and moral sensibility can be separated so easily:

What Davis does not see, however, is that his philosophical argument would deny him the moral attitude to the Holocaust that he says he shares with Roth and myself. What a moral attitude towards an evil is shows itself in what one is prepared to say about it. Roth and I are not prepared to speak about it in the way Davis does when he philosophizes … Davis, logically, cannot claim to share the same attitude to the Holocaust, while at the same time talk differently about it. ⁶

Phillips is making a basically Wittgensteinian observation here; it makes no sense to talk about an attitude towards something that is not shown when one is actually talking about that thing. If one finds the existence of certain events horrific and mystifying, this attitude will be shown in how one talks about such events, and any significant differences in the way that people are prepared to discuss such events must count as differences of attitude; that is part of what it means to have an ‘attitude’ (as is apparent in the phrase ‘he has a bit of an attitude’, which more often than not is used to comment on how someone speaks). ⁷ In other words, a lack of attentiveness to human suffering can be recognised in forms of argument, lines of thought, and the way that both are expressed.

What Phillips does not explore, however, is what kind of talk would be evidence of a morally appropriate attitude towards horrendous evils, and why; or how a morally sensitive attitude towards human suffering might be manifested in speech. Perhaps more interestingly, he does not ask what the relationship may be between the moral sensitivity that ‘takes suffering seriously’, and the ability to show compassion, in practice, to actual sufferers. If the judgement that certain forms of argument, which have been regarded by some as perfectly sensible, are to be regarded as morally suspect even to engage in, it seems reasonable to ask these questions. ⁸

My aim in what follows is to show that some of the paradoxical and, at times, tortuous, intellectual moves that Simone Weil makes, especially in her late notebooks, may shed valuable light on this set of issues. Weil was deeply critical of beliefs that appear to express a failure to attend to the reality of suffering, but by the same token, was quite prepared to advance highly speculative and abstract statements concerning the religious significance of suffering, and at times this makes for an uncomfortable mix. Central to the discussion that follows is the question of how compassion is related to thought. If ‘compassion’ is the attention that suffering calls for, and is, as Weil believed it to be, the criterion of the presence of the love of God ‘here below’, how does compassion enter into thought, and what kind of thought is necessary for compassion? On the reading I will put forward, the essays and notebooks that make up Weil’s late work constitute an insightful yet deeply flawed attempt to articulate compassion as a thought, to think so as to produce compassion, and, ultimately, to make thought itself compassionate.

Suffering and Compassion

If Eleonore Stump’s Wandering in Darkness has been hailed as the most thought-provoking and important contribution to debate about theodicy to appear for some time, this is in part because of the depth and sensitivity it shows in articulating the actual experience of sufferers. The central conviction here is that if one wants to show how God is justified in allowing suffering, it must be suffering as it is actually experienced and lived through that is thereby justified, and despite a commitment to the practice of analytic forms of argument, Stump admits that analytic discussions of the problem of evil have been sorely lacking on this front. ⁹ Similarly, a good part of the merit and fertility of Simone Weil’s work consists in the profundity of her descriptions of human suffering, whether of the experience of mechanised labour, ¹⁰ the violent futility of war, ¹¹ or simply the experience of intense regret. ¹² Weil’s comments about how one should think and speak about suffering are intimately entwined with her understanding of what it is actually like to suffer.

One of Weil’s central convictions is expressed very simply: ‘thought flies from affliction as promptly and irresistibly as an animal flies from death’. ¹³ As a result, we seldom, if ever, contemplate the worst suffering—in ourselves, or in others—honestly or willingly. Drawing on the book of Job, Weil stresses the human tendency to despise the afflicted, to ‘attach all the scorn, all the revulsion, all the hatred which our reason attaches to crime, to affliction’. ¹⁴ To contemplate total humiliation in another is to risk contemplating it in oneself, and so the sight of affliction repels the intellect, because it makes us aware of our ‘almost infinite fragility’. ¹⁵ The body can be left in permanent pain by the simplest of physical changes, and the soul and social personality are equally subject to unpredictable forces and dependent upon all sorts of external objects, themselves temporary and unpredictable. ¹⁶ To consider the reality of the afflicted in another is to face the thought that we too are entirely at the mercy of circumstance; that no deep principle or existential right—nothing, in fact, other than the workings of ‘blind necessity’—distinguishes my well-being from another’s poverty, sickness or sorrow. ¹⁷

In affliction, one is subject to contradictory forces: suffering consumes one’s attention and brings it back repeatedly to the present, but at the same time produces the desire for a future, any future, in which there is no trace of this suffering. When articulating the experience of this kind of temporal conflict, Weil makes a point that will be particularly important for the discussion that follows. She notes that often two thoughts concerning the duration of suffering appear to ease the burden a little: that it will stop immediately in the very next moment, or that it will continue for ever. ‘We can think of it as impossible or necessary, but we can never think that it simply is. That is unendurable.’ ¹⁸ The hope that suffering is going to stop in the very next instant is linked to the thought ‘I cannot bear it, therefore it is going to cease’, and gives rise to deception, insofar as one begins to believe that the world is structured according to one’s desires. ¹⁹ However, to gloomily suppose that suffering is destined to last for ever may be to seek for comfort in despair, which is at least fixed and final, and therefore potentially subject to control. If suffering, however horrific, can be relied upon, or predicted, then the element of chance and senselessness is diminished, so that one does not have to contemplate the fact that no deep principle governs its distribution. The point here seems to be that false forms of hope may not be all that different from despair; both seek an escape from the tension that suffering produces, and the contingency that characterises it. ²⁰

For all of the reasons above, the act of showing compassion to the afflicted is, for Weil, a supernatural act, because it involves contemplating senselessness with those who suffer, without ceasing to love the world that produces such suffering. The contemplation of suffering is a kind of secondary level of suffering, an expenditure of energy with no reward. One suffers not only through acknowledging another individual’s affliction, but simply through acknowledging the possibility of such affliction. In her study of her own recovery from a brutal rape and attempted murder, philosopher Susan Brison noted a similar tendency in the responses of others to her suffering. She found that even those closest to her seemed to respond to her attack with a certain level of denial, manifested as an impulsive need to find ways to mitigate the senselessness of the experience, the way in which there was nothing, really, for her to learn from it. She also notes that this tendency extended even to her own response to what had happened:

I watched my own attempts to find something for which to be grateful, something to redeem the unmitigated awfulness: I was glad I didn’t have to reproach myself (or endure others’ reproaches) for having done something careless, but I wished I had done something I could consider reckless so that I could simply refrain from doing it in the future … Those who haven’t been sexually violated may have difficulty understanding why women who survive assault often blame themselves, and may wrongly attribute it to a sex-linked trait of masochism or lack of self-esteem. They don’t know that it can be less painful to believe that you did something blameworthy than it is to think that you live in a world where you can be attacked at any time, in any place, simply because you are a woman. ²¹

Brison was amazed to find all kinds of people—even those working at rape counselling services—ask her questions like ‘were you alone? was it dark?’ as if, were the answer ‘yes, yes’ instead of ‘no, no’, this would give more sense to the crime, or inject some faint semblance of order to what had happened. Brison here testifies to the tendency that Weil judges to be an almost instinctive reaction: to see patterns and principles governing the distribution of suffering. In the most extreme cases, such as Brison’s, part of the experience of suffering is its senselessness, and as a consequence, compassion requires one to give up one’s demand for sense.

To give one’s attention to the suffering of others, on this reading, involves sacrifice. We have the ability to ‘sweeten what is bitter’, that is, to throw a veil over reality by seeing lessons, explanations, compensations where there are none, but this possibility must be renounced so that the suffering neighbour may be loved as they are, their past contemplated unredeemed. The deepest compassion, then, is supernatural, and differs from most acts of pity, which are frequently a kind of necessary guard against the impact of affliction when one can no longer avoid encountering it. One usually offers help to someone so as to discharge the obligation to think of their suffering, or else to enjoy the feeling of power that comes through observing the effect that one’s efforts can have upon those less fortunate than oneself, whereas compassion involves treating the other as oneself, and may mean a reduction in one’s sense of power and life. This painful identification is not necessarily made any easier by one’s relative experience or innocence: those who have not suffered may dread it, and so be unwilling to think of the possibility; those who have suffered rightly hate it and may wish only to forget it. It is also opposed to any kind of fascination or love of suffering. Despite the fact that because of what one knows about her life and manner of death, one may read in many of her more extreme comments an unhealthy preoccupation with suffering, Weil is perfectly clear that the seeking out of suffering is mistaken, and wrong. ²² To seek suffering because of what it may, somehow, give or produce is to fail to recognise the destructive nature of affliction, and fail to value the life it destroys.

Compassionate Thought

There is, of course, a great deal more that could be said about Weil’s understanding of suffering, but the comments above may serve as a survey of some of the most salient aspects of that understanding. In what follows I would like to focus on Weil’s understanding of how the reality of suffering may be accepted, and how that acceptance is manifested. The important question for Weil is not so much how to ‘take suffering seriously’, but how to accept ‘with one’s whole soul’ the existence of suffering. ²³ It is clear that for Weil compassion begins with the recognition and acceptance of suffering, and that she has quite a distinct understanding of what this means. As we will see, Weil is clear that compassion is quite possible without a conscious understanding of its inner meaning, but it is also clear that she believed that this quality could be displayed at the level of one’s conceptual understanding, and that conceptual understanding itself can be compassionate, or lacking in compassion.

Her essay on the Iliad contains some of her clearest comments on what it means to recognise the suffering human, and the frequency of reference to this poem in her notebooks indicates its importance within her thought. It is the tone, or accent, of the poem that Weil admires above all:

Justice and love, for which there can hardly be a place in this picture of extremes and unjust violence, yet shed their light over the whole without ever being discerned otherwise than by the accent. Nothing precious is despised, whether or not destined to perish … This accent is inseparable from the idea which inspired the Gospels; for the understanding of human suffering is dependent upon justice, and love is its condition … Particularly rare is a true expression of misfortune: in painting it one almost always effects to believe, first, that degradation is the innate vocation of the unfortunate; second that a soul may suffer affliction without being marked by it, without changing all consciousness in a particular manner which belongs to itself alone. ²⁴

This last point is particularly important. The presentation of human suffering, whether fictional, theological or philosophical, tends in two directions: one is to seek to learn too much from it, to begin to suggest that its distribution manifests some kind of intelligible pattern (hence the need to ask ‘was it dark? were you alone?’); the other is to downplay the extent of its influence on the human person (and this is where Weil, despite many important similarities, breaks from a Stoic conception of the person: we do not have all the resources necessary to bear any amount of suffering). ²⁵ In other words, one technique of avoidance is to refuse to contemplate meaninglessness; the other is to refuse to contemplate fragility.

For Weil, both are necessary to truly comprehend the suffering of the innocent: that which is most precious is also most exposed; that to which what is most precious is exposed does not obey any principle of desert or operate according to any teleology. A ‘true’ expression of misfortune implies the acceptance of an almost unbearable tension, produced by contingency: that this particular suffering is neither necessary, nor illusory; it just is, for its own limited, but terrible duration. ²⁶ An authentic recognition of suffering, then, is one which is prepared to love that which is both infinitely precious and completely vulnerable, without seeking to diminish this tension. The stance necessary to do this is also that which is required to really love another; to love the person in front of you ‘without wishing them immortal, or dead’. ²⁷

Nevertheless, if Weil has a sensitive and developed account of what the authentic recognition of suffering looks like, she also has an enormous amount to say about how and what one should learn from suffering; the contemplation of suffering is also the opportunity to be confronted by reality, and learn. This is expressed with particular force and clarity in the following remark:

Let us suppose a man whose entire family has perished amidst tortures, and who himself was long exposed to torture in a concentration camp; or an American Indian of the sixteenth century who was the sole survivor of his people. Such men as these, if they ever believed in God’s mercy, either believe in it no longer, or else conceive it in an entirely different fashion from that in which they did before. I myself have not gone through such things. But I know that they exist; hence what difference is there? It comes, or must come, or should come to the same thing. ²⁸

Just as the friends in the book of Job are judged lacking, because their conception of God fails to include Job’s exceptional experience, so Weil suggests here that there is something wrong with any conception of God that could not be shared by someone who had been through the most extreme affliction, or communicated to them without insult. This would be to exclude them from one’s moral or spiritual universe, or to deny their existence (and for Weil, to love is to feel ‘with one’s whole soul’ the existence of another being). ²⁹ In the discussion between Stephen T. Davis and John K. Roth noted above, Davis makes a rather troubling statement which illustrates almost exactly the point that Weil is trying to make here. Davis asks himself whether he is in theory open to evidence that might challenge his belief in a loving, all-powerful God that makes the magnitude of suffering intelligible and acceptable. He notes that there could indeed be:

And contrary to Roth’s pointed query, yes, there are conceivable events that if they occurred would make me change my beliefs. For example, if human suffering became massive, universal, and destructive of morality and the practice of religion, it would be extremely difficult for me to continue believing in a good and all-powerful God. But I can hardly be faulted for the fact that such an event has not yet occurred. ³⁰

Weil’s question to Davis would be why he does not already find the existence of the sufferings of ‘such men as these’ (which, on Weil’s analysis, may well be both massive and destructive of morality) a traumatic fact, impossible to simply assimilate? Why would an increase in the proportion of the human population who suffer destructive atrocities make any philosophical difference? The final line of this train of thought is an accusation: why do we not give these realities the kind of significance we would give to them if we were ‘such men’?

To show real compassion is, at some level, to recognise the extreme fragility of human existence, the contingency of well-being, etc., while at the same time loving this existence and the possibilities—some of which are terrible—it contains. For Weil, there is a sense in which this recognition, acceptance and love resonates at every level of the human person, and every level of thought, and is a diffused presence in every aspect of the person. In her judgement, it is possible to discern that the author of the Iliad had recognised human suffering through the tone or accent of the poem, and she analyses the practice of giving to those who are afflicted in a similar way. In reference to the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25, she writes:

Those whom Christ recognised as his benefactors are those whose compassion rested upon the knowledge of affliction. The others give capriciously, irregularly, or else too regularly, or from habit imposed by training, or in conformity with social convention, or from vanity or emotional pity, or for the sake of good conscience—in a word, from self-regarding motives. They are arrogant, or patronizing or tactlessly sympathetic, or they let the afflicted man feel that they regard him simply as a specimen of a certain type of affliction. In any case, their gift is an injury … Their contact with the afflicted must be a false one, because the true understanding of afflicted implies knowledge of affliction. Those who have not seen the face of affliction, or are not prepared to, can only approach the afflicted behind a veil of illusion or falsehood. ³¹

The ways in which one can give to the afflicted badly are legion, and easily described, but it is much more difficult to describe what it is that constitutes genuine compassion. Here Weil relies again upon the idea that the genuine recognition of suffering can be intuitively recognised or felt, this time by those who are themselves suffering.

In summary, for Weil, it seems as though the ability to show compassion is intimately linked not just with recognition of a particular person’s suffering, but with the acceptance of something which is more like a philosophical truth about the world in general, and with an underlying attitude towards it, a way of being oriented. And all of this is linked to her understanding of the acceptance of death, because, for all the reasons above (and more), to face suffering seriously and honestly is akin to facing death: ‘to be able to face affliction with steady attention when it is close to him a man must be prepared, for the love of truth, to accept the death of the soul’. ³² Compassion, the love of truth, and the acceptance of death are all of a piece.

However, what is far less clear in her work is how this actually works out in the relationship between conceptual thought and intuitive behaviour or affective response. In other words, it is not clear whether these insights provide any guide to actually judging concrete theological statements. It is clear that compassion cannot be understood fully without reference to the way that we respond, in thought, to the reality of suffering, but what is not clear is how far, and in what ways, we are to use this insight. The comments above about the ‘two thoughts’ concerning the duration of suffering show that for Weil the character of thoughts formed in response to the phenomenon of suffering is not simply a matter of their content, because thoughts that seem to be opposed—that suffering will end immediately; that suffering will never end—may arise from the same kind of evasive response. For Weil, thoughts are responses, and as a result they should be judged as responses. But is the business of discerning whether any particular attempt to comment on the relationship between God and the human condition ‘takes suffering seriously’ simply a matter of intuitive discernment, or is there more that can be said here?

Secrecy and Architecture

In what follows I want to argue that in fact, despite the ideas introduced so far, there is a parallel tendency in Weil’s work to introduce distinctions that in fact distance the business of forming abstract concepts from one’s disposition towards others, particularly those who suffer. A good part of Weil’s work is concerned to articulate her sense that Christianity is, most essentially, the belief that despite the destructiveness of affliction, God is paradoxically present through it. This is an enormously complicated issue in her work, and has been discussed comprehensively by many others. ³³ It is sufficient here simply to note that Weil does, in various ways, express the basic thought that affliction is, paradoxically, ‘a marvel of divine technique’, ³⁴ and contains, if we know how to look for it, ‘the truth about our condition’. ³⁵ It is not just that, given the existence of suffering, Christianity proposes a way of making the best of it; for Weil, the possibility of affliction is sewn into the act of creation itself, and there is no way for the soul to be sanctified without learning the secret that affliction has to teach. To experience affliction is to experience the distance that constitutes creation as creation; it is to experience the absence of God, which, again paradoxically, is also God’s presence. There is a sense in which suffering reveals the truth of creaturely existence. ³⁶ This conviction gives rise to an extraordinary tension with her work: how to remain true to the senselessness and destructiveness of much human suffering, whilst at the same time affirming that this same suffering is, considered in the right way, the most precious gift that has been bestowed on creation. In a number of key passages in her notebooks she wrestles with similar problems, and it is her attempts to negotiate them that I want to explore in what follows.

A good example of the kind of internal tension I am interested in is found in a cluster of remarks from her New York notebook. She begins:

If one is hungry one eats, not for the love of God but because one is hungry. If an unknown man lying hungry in the road is hungry one must give him food, even if one has not enough for oneself, not for the love of God, but because he is hungry. ³⁷

If one demands an explanation of the suffering of the afflicted before one is prepared to give them one’s attention, one will never get as far as compassion. Compassion involves feeling and responding to another’s need as naturally as one feels one’s own, without consideration of outcomes, or need for supplementary motivations. Or in other words, compassion involves seeing only the current reality of suffering, not some future resolution or significance, not something one’s action would be ‘for’. Compassion is perfectly simple, and corresponds to completely undivided attention.

However, on the next page, and when reflecting in a more speculative mode about goodness and God, Weil appears to affirm the exact opposite:

Every thinking being is worthy of love solely in so far as he has received existence by God’s creative act, and possesses the right to renounce that existence for the love of God. It is solely on this account that I have the right to love myself or another. Only God is the good, therefore only he is a worthy object of care, solicitude, anxiety, longing, and efforts of thought. ³⁸

In this case, the attempt to describe the deeper metaphysical structure within which compassion has its place seems to compromise the immediacy that is supposed to characterise it: how can one be compassionate if one believes that only God is worthy of attention? The sense that compassion is sacred leads Weil to articulate what is meant by ‘the love of God’, and to suggest a more abstract framework which incorporates this sense, but at the risk of being unfaithful to the actual state of soul which gave rise to the insight. Weil is not unaware of this, as another nearby comment indicates: ‘There are some truths which one must not know, or not too much. E.g. that the final outcome of obedience to God is undoubtedly beatitude.’ ³⁹ One cannot know that obedience has an outcome ‘too much’ because projecting a scheme in which one’s obedience leads, steadily, to ‘beatitude’ encourages one to present the world as an ordered whole, which only requires one’s reasoned participation, and such a scheme would not challenge one’s basic tendency to treat everything as valuable and meaningful primarily in reference to oneself.

Weil goes on to say that the value of some representations is dependent on their use (the example given is the notion of hell, which should only be considered in relation to oneself), ⁴⁰ and then suggests that this implies the need for a subtle structuring of thought:

In the domain of the transcendent there is architecture of representation and ideas. Some are to be put in the foreground and others in the silent, secret part of the soul, unknown to consciousness. Some should be in the imagination, others in the completely abstract intelligence, others in both places, etc.

This complex and refined architecture, which is operative even in those who are called simple, if they are close to sanctity, is what builds a soul ready for salvation. ⁴¹

Weil does not explicitly link this point with her comments on compassion, self-love and the love of God, but there does seem to be a link, and their proximity within her flow of thought demands that we consider it. On Weil’s account, in compassion, there is in the foreground the simple need of another person, which exerts a pressure without further reference, just as one’s hunger is itself the reason for satisfying it—we do not eat because of the thought ‘I want to live’, but in a sense we might say that hunger is the thought ‘I want to live’. However, as a response to extreme suffering, real compassion is rare and seemingly unnatural, and so, if it exists, it needs explaining. One way of expressing this miracle involves an understanding of the good of created beings, which is of a more abstract nature. An ‘architecture’ is then required, one which will harmonise conceptual insight with one’s sense of duty and connection to others, so that one can form in the intelligence the idea that it is the goodness of God which makes love of self and neighbour-as-self legitimate, while keeping this insight sufficiently secret, so that it may exert its influence without being noticed, in such a way that compassion arises as if it were instinctive. Just as one gives in secret, so that the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing, so one understands religious metaphysics in secret, so that one’s relational self does not know what one’s philosophical self is doing.

This may seem rather cumbersome, but a similar kind of ‘architecture’ can be found in a number of Weil’s most important ideas. Elsewhere, she makes a similar point in terms of different levels or planes of reality, and here the difficulty in articulating and affirming certain ideas is linked to the possibility of something being true at one level but not at another:

To enumerate the truths which are of such a nature that by affirming them one destroys them (e.g. the grace included in sin), because they are not true on the same plane on which the opinions one is affirming are found (on that plane, the reverse is true), but on a higher plane. They are only able to be perceived as true by such minds as are capable of conceiving on several vertical, superposed planes simultaneously; to other minds they remain completely incommunicable. ⁴²

It is difficult to know precisely what Weil means by ‘planes’ here—the context here suggests that they can be taken to refer both to some kind of hierarchical conception of reality, and to different aspects of the human person and experience. The conflict between levels arises because of Weil’s basic conviction that suffering, especially in its most extreme forms, is both a brutal reality that means nothing, gives nothing, and sheds no light, and at the same time a ‘marvel of divine technique’, the means of engaging in a transforming experience of God. ⁴³ Weil’s account of the redemptive ‘use’ of suffering (which we do not have the space to explore here) is pervaded by her consciousness of the paradoxical demand to learn the value of suffering whilst recognising that suffering is unredemptive. ⁴⁴ In speaking about redemptive suffering, she is prepared to say that it has a purpose, that it bears fruit, and more than this, that this process can in some way be grasped and expressed as an intelligible process. As a result, it contains an astonishing internal tension, and is infused with a philosopher’s desire to comprehend and represent the world according to its underlying principle, whilst remaining faithful to two basically opposing experiences: ‘Suffering, thou art evil, but he who is thine author is One that is only good and is only the author of good.’ ⁴⁵

The upshot of all this is that the conceptual truth that expresses an experience may be at odds in some way with the experience itself. To articulate the truth of the higher plane too soon, or in the wrong way, may be to destroy the truth of the lower plane; suffering may never be accepted in its destructive reality, because conceptual formulations that strive to describe this miracle become an opportunity to evade through imagination the truth that blind, destructive suffering is real. Suffering can never become redemptive if it is never accepted as it is. The attempt to make an experience more intelligible may be to block access to the experience, or falsely avoid it: one must not speak too much or too soon, because experience is changed as it is spoken of. However, as we have seen, in other ways Weil supposes a more peaceful continuity between levels of reality, and a more organic interaction between thought and action, concept and experience.

Two observations can be made on this point that relate to the remaining discussion. First, when criticising modes of thinking which, on her account, fail to display compassion, Weil tends to stress the continuity between abstract thought and responsive behaviour. This is one of the main concerns expressed in her ‘Letter to a priest’, in which she writes: ‘[o]ne may lay down as a postulate: All conceptions of God which are incompatible with a movement of pure charity are false. All other conceptions of him, in varying degrees, are true.’ ⁴⁶ In an important sense, then, the ability to recognise some suffering as intolerable, unexplained and unjustified becomes a criterion for judging beliefs; any belief which allows or encourages one to throw a veil over suffering is itself a lack of compassion, an ‘expression of submission to the Great Beast’. ⁴⁷ As the capacity to genuinely pay attention is both intellectual and ethical (see in particular the essay ‘Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies’ in Waiting on God), there is continuity between concept and behaviour. Those who acknowledge undeserved suffering in theory will be more likely to recognise and respond to it in practice, and only those who recognise it in practice will be able to recognise it in theory. Any conception of God which emerges from a failure to recognise suffering, or which produces or reproduces this failure, is incompatible with a movement of pure charity, and so false. In this sense, thought and behaviour are condemned or affirmed with the same judgement. Kindness produces truth by nourishing one’s capacity for attention, just as cruelty reaffirms one’s incapacity to recognise suffering and the real existence of the other. ⁴⁸ However, by the same token, beliefs reproduce and spread the blindness or cruelty in which they were conceived: those who believe that the order of the world clearly communicates the existence of a merciful God must become increasingly blind, deaf and pitiless in order to remain committed to this correspondence. ⁴⁹ As a simultaneously intellectual and ethical capacity, attention is the capacity and willingness to contemplate the world without lying to oneself or deliberately looking away from unwelcome facts; the capacity to ‘wait’: ‘[a]bove all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object which is to penetrate it’. ⁵⁰ Evidence of this spiritual virtue is found at all levels or aspects of the human person. One can be compassionate in thought, word and deed.

One way of summing up the demand that Weil makes here is in terms of attention: she wanted to articulate spiritual truth in such a way that would foster undivided attention, and was extremely sensitive to the way that religious concepts tend often to divide attention. ⁵¹ Attention should not be consciously directed towards God or the prospect of spiritual benefit when responding to the needs of another, or rather, if it is, one is not really responding to the needs of another, but acting with another purpose in mind (the service of God, the sanctity of one’s own soul). The attention demanded by the affliction of others is such that there is no room for any other object, so that if one believes, as Weil did, that the love of neighbour is somehow one with the love of God, this knowledge must be hidden away at the highest level, beyond comprehension. ⁵² One must love one’s neighbour as one’s neighbour, and nothing more, before this love can be found to be secretly the love of God. It is not too difficult to love God, but too easy, because as a thought detached from human interaction, ‘God’ is almost infinitely malleable, and can be shaped to fit our desires exactly. ⁵³ As a result, one can only think about, or love God, through thinking of the world in a particular way. ⁵⁴ For Weil, spiritual treasure, reward, life, etc. are found at a qualitatively different level from their earthly counterparts, and any conceptual framework that allows such notions to be treated as straightforward goals that could be attained by particular means, or that can be used as an excuse to direct attention away from the present, should not be known ‘too much’, and only believed ‘secretly’.

Secondly, then, when attempting more positively to articulate stages of spiritual development, or the way that ‘supernatural bread’ fills the void after one has waited, Weil tends to allow for a certain discontinuity between thought or belief and attitude or behaviour, so as to make room for a wary, delicate form of affirmation, as well as experiments in religious metaphysics. It is true that in a certain sense, the love of the world is the love of God, but one has to know how to know this, and this is itself part of the ‘movement of pure charity’. Certain truths are known only asymmetrically; one learns—miraculously—to read reality differently, so that one’s suffering and one’s ease are both taken as the touch of God, signs of God’s love, ⁵⁵ but this truth has to be held in such a way that it never becomes a lens through which reality can be viewed with less discomfort. Somehow, religious truth has to be articulated, and held, in such a way as to respect the ‘order of discovery’, ⁵⁶ and in such a way as to encourage rather than discourage the giving of undivided attention.

Conclusion

The issues at stake here are far too large and complex to be cleared up by a discussion as limited as this one must necessarily be. Nevertheless, I do hope to have shown, first, how Weil’s many reflections on the nature of suffering and compassion, and their relation to thought might be used to give a clearer expression of the intuition that failures to ‘take suffering seriously’ can indeed be felt not just in practice, but also in theory. In some respects, Weil may be taken to be articulating more clearly the basic intuition that runs through a number of the ‘anti-theodicies’ that have been put forward in recent decades. There may, of course, be a number of problems with the particular form that this rejection of theodicy takes. It has been said, for example, that the moral critique of theodicy is question-begging, since the critique is only justified if the question that theodicies begin by asking is already presumed to have been answered in a certain way; in other words, it would only be morally abhorrent to consider whether there are any morally sufficient reasons for God to allow suffering if there were, in fact, no such reasons. ⁵⁷ It has also been said that there is something hypocritical about the charge of ‘moral insensitivity’, insofar as it pours moral scorn on the very idea of attempting to discuss the philosophical significance of the great evils of history, whilst implicitly relying on philosophical premises and attempting to score philosophical points. ⁵⁸ But what Weil tries to show, successfully in my view, is that compassion and abstract intellectual life really are intimately linked, so that thoughts about suffering are responses to suffering; one might even say that thought itself can be compassionate, or lacking in compassion.

Secondly, however, I hope to have shown that Weil’s work also provides ample reason to think that the nature of this connection is very difficult to articulate coherently and consistently, so that it is not clear what one should do with this insight. This is, perhaps, what is problematic about Weil’s comment about the victim of torture and the belief in divine mercy. It is a powerful challenge to any conventional language concerning the goodness of God, a challenge to allow abstractions to encounter reality, and see how they fare after being tested. But at the same time it appears to demand a task which cannot be fully carried through or finished; it is far easier to see how any particular religious concept is incompatible with ‘a movement of perfect charity’ than it is to show the reverse. ‘Such men as these, if they ever believed in God’s mercy, either believe in it no longer, or else conceive it in an entirely different fashion from that in which they did before.’ ⁵⁹ But this is, of course, the whole problem: how would they conceive of it? Would the difference be in the concept, or in their manner of conceiving it—the potentially infinitely complicated way in which that conception is part of their life? If there is a way of believing in divine mercy which is somehow ‘compatible’ with such experiences, in the sense of being formed and held without desperately searching for ‘false consolations’, its coherence and compatibility can never appear so as to be judged or ratified, because the compatibility is never fully visible, and not known in advance. The difference between the belief of ‘such men as these’ and myself would not be found simply in the conceptual form of the beliefs we each hold, so that this difference could be presented for critical comparison; the difference would be between us, in our human lives, where concepts, beliefs, experience, instinct, character and actions are mysteriously united. More than this, Weil appears to suggest here that one’s conception of God should seek to go ahead of one’s own experience: ‘[i]t comes, or must come, or should come to the same thing’; that is, one should be able to think of the mercy of God as if one had been through ‘such things’ oneself, to have one’s concepts tested by these experiences in advance. That one knows that ‘such men as these’ exist should be enough. But this comes close to disregarding the actual testimony of sufferers, such that one could decide in advance which conceptual idols their suffering would smash, or which insights the fire of their testimony would purify. ⁶⁰ And this, in turn, undercuts a conviction that Weil expresses forcefully elsewhere: ‘[t]he love of neighbour in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: “What are you going through?”’ ⁶¹

In place of a conclusion, and with this question in mind, I offer a suggestion. If Weil’s central intuitions are right, it follows that one can best learn the truth about suffering through attention that is undivided and honest; the first condition of truth is the refusal of falsehood. ⁶² These intuitions can be discerned in Janet Martin Soskice’s memorable words, which make explicit the promise that underlies all of the above: ‘attention is rewarded with reality’. ⁶³ Perhaps, then, Weil’s reflections are best thought of as forming the basis, not of a rationale of judgement, such that one might judge how ‘seriously’ suffering is taken in this or that argument, but rather as the basis of a hope: the hope that through the giving of attention one might learn to be compassionate, in thought as well as deed.