On Force & the Iliad in Simone Weil
by Erin Doom
Feast of St Martin the Confessor, Pope of Rome; Holy Monday in East
Anno Domini 2020, April 13
1. Essays & Reflections:
As promised last week, today I offer you three essays written on Simone Weil by the New Moot, a local EDI reading-thinking-writing group. They were all provoked by reading her essay on the Iliad: “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force.” This first essay by Jeff Reimer suggests that while Weil’s reading of the Iliad
is illuminating, ultimately she got it wrong. According to Reimer,
Weil repeatedly emphasizes the dynamics of force that undermine genuine vulnerability in the meeting between Achilles and Priam. But this gets the thrust of the passage exactly backwards. The fact that the two men can meet at all – men who are at war and whose very livelihoods depend on the destruction of the other – and still recognize each other’s vulnerability and humanity is the true miracle of the poem.
2. Essays & Reflections:
Matthew Umbarger is also critical of Weil for her “blindness to the whole testimony of the Old Covenant…” For the Hebrews, Weil argues, “misfortune was a sure indication of sin and hence a legitimate object of contempt …. And no text of the Old Testament strikes a note comparable to the note heard in the Greek epic, unless it be certain parts of the book of Job.” Umbarger thus wonders “if her failure to appreciate the faith of her own Jewish people in the First Covenant presented a stumbling block to her being baptized into the New.” And he labels her biblical framework as “deuteronomistic theology,” i.e., a this-worldly principle that equates obedience with material blessing and disobedience with punishing curses. But is this simplistic formula really what the Old Testament teaches?
3. Essays & Reflections:
The final essay by Stuart Busenitz turns to The Lord of the Rings, focusing on “Tolkien’s Epic Genius: The Ring, Force, and Redemption.” According to Busenitz,
Amidst the clash of good and evil, light and darkness, beauty and horror, the hobbits shine brighter and resist longer than the seemingly more powerful agents of good [i.e., Gandalf, Galadriel, Elrond, Aragorn]. Their virtue is constructed on generations of sacramental living wherein the simple pleasures and beauty of life are enjoyed in their proper portion and order resulting in a formidable buffer between the allure of absolute force presented in the possession of the one ring.
More:
The smallness of hobbits, both in stature and power, allows them to navigate through the perils of darkest temptations that the mighty dare not tread. The humility grown in sacramental living – wherein the eating of simple food and excellent beer is more to be wished than the ambition of an emperor – allows darkness, ugliness, and evil to engulf its own destruction.
4. Books: Three books by Simone Weil with a bonus.
And here’s the review mentioned in Reimer’s essay
on Karen Olsson’s book The Weil Conjectures: On Math and the Pursuit of the Unknown.
5. Poetry: "Love" (III) by George Herbert (and the conversion of Simone Weil)
Holy Week, sacraments, and poetry were pivotal to Simone Weil’s pilgrimage toward Christianity. Read (and memorize it like Simone Weil did!) Herbert’s poem after reading the following excerpt from a letter written in Marseilles, France (May 15, 1942) to her friend Fr. Perrin about liturgy, poetry, and mystical experiences:
In 1938 I spent ten days at Solesmes, from Palm Sunday to Easter Tuesday, following all the liturgical services. I was suffering from splitting headaches; each sound hurt me like a blow; by an extreme effort of concentration I was able to rise above this wretched flesh, to leave it to suffer by itself, heaped up in a corner, and to find a pure and perfect joy in the unimaginable beauty of the chanting and the words. This experience enabled me by analogy to get a better understanding of the possibility of loving divine love in the midst of affliction. It goes without saying that in the course of these services the thought of the Passion of Christ entered into my being once and for all.
There was a young English Catholic there from whom I gained my first idea of the supernatural power of the sacraments because of the truly angelic radiance with which he seemed to be clothed after going to communion. Chance – for I always prefer saying chance rather than Providence – made of him a messenger to me. For he told me of the existence of those English poets of the seventeenth century who are named metaphysical. In reading them later on, I discovered the poem of which I read you what is unfortunately a very inadequate translation. It is called “Love.” I learned it by heart. Often, at the culminating point of a violent headache, I make myself say it over, concentrating all my attention upon it and clinging with all my soul to the tenderness it enshrines. I used to think I was merely reciting it as a beautiful poem, but without my knowing it the recitation had the virtue of a prayer. It was during one of these recitations that, as I told you, Christ himself came down and took possession of me.... Moreover, in this sudden possession of me by Christ, neither my senses nor my imagination had any part; I only felt in the midst of my suffering the presence of a love, like that which one can read in the smile on a beloved face.
6. Bible:
Matt. 24:3-35 and 21:18-43. Online here.
7. Liturgy: Feast day of St Martin the Confessor, Pope of Rome
Hymn of Praise by St Nikolai Velimirovic
St Martin the Pope speaks before the Senate:
“Let my body be crushed and burned.
The most cruel sufferings will I joyfully endure,
But the true Faith will I not deny.
The Good Savior was God and man.
He had two natures and two wills,
But both natures were in one Person,
And both wills in a single light.
Such a Faith all the Fathers passed on to us;
For such a Faith many suffered.
May I suffer also, I the least of all,
A servant of my Lord, and of all the most sinful!”
Thus Martin confessed his faith to all,
Speaking truth before the heretics.
Oh, the worth of a man when he fears God!
Above little men he stands like a mountain!
Apolytikion in the Third Tone
Thou dids’t strengthen the Church with true doctrine, O wise Hierarch Martin; thou didst declare the two natures of Christ and put heresy to shame. Pray to Him to grant us His great mercy.
Kontakion in Plagal of the Fourth Tone
O High Priest and Teacher of Mysteries, thou didst pour forth streams of doctrine; thou didst expound the true theology that Christ has two natures and wills. Intercede for those who cry: Rejoice, blessed Father Martin.
8. Word from the Fathers: Matins for Holy and Great Monday (in the East)
Behold the Bridegroom comes in the middle of the night; and blessed is the servant whom He shall find watching, but unworthy is he whom He shall find in slothfulness. Beware, then, O my soul, and be not overcome by sleep, lest thou be given over to death and shut out from the Kingdom. But return to soberness and cry aloud: Holy, holy, holy art Thou, O God: through the Theotokos have mercy upon us.
Today the Holy Passion shines forth upon the world with the light of salvation; for Christ in His love hastens to His sufferings. He who holds all things in the hollow of His hand consents to be hung upon the Tree, that He may save mankind.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. Both now and ever and unto the ages of ages. Amen.
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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