Simone Weil on the Iliad: An Illuminating (but Failed) Interpretation

IN A RECENT review of a book on Simone Weil, Scott Beauchamp wrote that “any book about Simone Weil is, for one reason or another, worth reading.” He enumerates three reasons why. First, he says, “When a writer successfully conveys the heft of her ideas about attention and grace, it’s obvious.” Second, “When a writer is able to effectively argue against the grain of her thought . . . that’s useful also.” And third, “When a writer sort of falls on their face, totally failing to think either with or against Weil, that’s illuminating in its own way too.”

I am not capable of the first. I shall attempt the second. But I shall most likely succeed only at the third. Perhaps, per Beauchamp’s taxonomy, that will also prove useful in its own way.

Simon Weil calls the Iliad “a miracle” because it successfully conveys the power of “force.” Force, she says, “is the true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad.” She defines force as “that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.”

Much of her essay is dedicated to outlining how force turns people into things in the Iliad. Through death primarily, but also, and just as if not more tragically, through the turning of a human being into a thing before he is killed. It is only in self-deception that man thinks he can wield force absolutely without eventually becoming subject to it in one way or another. The Greeks, Weil argues, understood that force is the engine of history. And for those “who perceive force . . . at the very center of human history, the Iliad is the purest and the loveliest of mirrors.”

All true. Weil’s interpretation of the Iliad is illuminating. Her simple prose, even in translation, exhibits a powerful intelligence. As so many other brilliant writers have attested, it is hard to read her and not be dazzled by the subtlety and sophistication of her intellect. And who would not want to be? Her reading of the Iliad casts a clear light on a central theme of Homer’s great poem, and the undercurrent of connections to the monumental events of her own day give the essay its own tragic and poetic weight. It is a testament to Weil’s genius that she saw what seems so obvious upon reading her essay. Of course it’s not obvious, but that’s one of the characteristics of genius: the capacity to comprehend the truth and articulate it to the rest of us with sufficient simplicity that we assume we should have seen things the same way. Weil understood that the Greeks saw, just as we must, that all men will be subject to force in some way.

But I promised to fall on my face, and I’d like to make good on that promise. As is no doubt apparent, I’m doing a lot of throat-clearing here. Because any interaction with Weil has to take account with the existential heft not just of her thought but of her life. Beauchamp, in the review mentioned above, says of the author, “In all the ways that [she—the author of the book about Weil] is unable to quite wrap her mind around Weil and the demands that her thoughts make on us, we see starkly illuminated so many of the spiritual failures of the modern world.” I’m very likely on track to provide just such an inadvertent illumination. Weil is one of those rare souls whose life informs her writing as much as the reverse, and interacting with her writing in isolation is an endeavor fraught with perils. Any sort of propositional sifting necessarily risks coming off as trite. In his preface to Weil’s The Need for Roots, T. S. Eliot famously wrote that in coming to terms with Weil’s work, “we must not be distracted—as is only too likely to happen on a first reading—by considering how far, and at what points, we agree or disagree. We must simply expose ourselves to the personality of a woman of genius.” And even more strongly: “agreement and rejection are secondary: what matters is to make contact with a great soul.”

All that to say: a particular combination of hubris and idiocy that lies within my less-than-great soul compels me to ignore all these warnings. I am aware of this fact. So I give my mea culpa in advance. 

Because although Weil’s reading of the Iliad is illuminating, it is a light that illuminates from only one side. And a light that only illuminates from one side also casts a shadow, leaving other aspects of the illuminated object in darkness. And this I think is the failure of Weil’s interpretation. Yes, force is a dominant aspect of the poem, and of human history—but it’s a dominant aspect. The fact that force impinges on the lives of all people—man and woman, adult and infant, Trojan and Achaean—and yet does not overwhelm the everyday, the quotidian, the vulnerable, the intimate, the beautiful—is what gives the poem its, well, force. 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. This is what makes the poem a true story about war, about humanity, about quiet moments of intimacy in the midst of destruction, battle, death, and hate.

Because that’s how life is! You’d think there would be no room for an Achilles and a Priam to meet in the midst of a years-long war. But force keeps getting all mixed up with the things that make for life. The failure of Weil’s reading of the Iliad is thus in its privileging of one valid perspective to the exclusion of the countervailing evidence that recognizes the perdurance of the human spirit precisely amid force. Over and over throughout the Iliad, the phrase “where men win glory” modifies “battle” or “battlefield.” Homer might have been ambivalent about the sentiment, but he did not mean it ironically.

Force turns humans into things. Poetry turns things back into humans. It is this accomplishment of Homer that makes the Iliad the purest and the loveliest of mirrors.

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Impatience with the complicatedness of life mars Weil’s understanding of Greek culture in general. For it is Greek culture’s singular accomplishment, she argues, to have recognized the centrality of force in human history and to have immortalized it in its poetry and in its tragic drama; an accomplishment, moreover, that finds fulfillment but also terminates in the Gospels, “the last marvelous expression of the Greek genius, as the Iliad is the first.” In the Gospels “human suffering is laid bare, and we see it in a being who is at once divine and human.” Conversely, “both the Romans and the Hebrews believed themselves to be exempt from the misery that is the common human lot.” The Romans, she says, “had no epics” (since she’s already dispatched with Virgil). And for the Hebrews “misfortune was a sure indication of sin and hence a legitimate object of contempt . . . a view that makes cruelty permissible and indeed indispensable.”

Odd, then, that the Gospels were written mostly, yes, by Greek speakers, but Greek-speaking Jews living among Jews and worshiping in Jewish synagogues—in Roman-occupied lands! It’s hard to imagine how these Greek-speaking Roman Jews managed to capture only the Greek spirit in their writing and sequester themselves so completely from their Roman and Hebrew influences.

I am furthermore suspicious of readings of history that treat centuries of cultural ferment in monolithic terms. While she allows for “certain parts of the book of Job” to communicate the tragic sensitivity to misery and suffering that characterize humanity, Weil, with a wave of the hand, dismisses the rest of the entire literatures of Israel and Rome as follows: “Throughout twenty centuries of Christianity, the Romans and the Hebrews have been admired, read, imitated, both in deed and word; their masterpieces have yielded an appropriate quotation every time anybody had a crime he wanted to justify.” A stinging indictment, maybe, but it strikes a false note. It’s too strident, something one would expect from a first-year grad student.

Weil’s great strength is the passion and intensity with which she internalized the suffering of others. It is also her weakness. Perhaps she is right that the aesthetic achievement of Greek culture has never been equaled in any of the cultures to which it gave birth or with which it was contemporaneous. I am prepared to agree with her. But in her cavalier dismissal she seems to succumb to the allure of force. In a sort of Manichaean zeal to divide the world into children of light and children of darkness, she takes upon herself the mantle of force, turning many centuries’ worth of people into things. She therefore—at least in this essay—ends up falling short of her own ideal, that “only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love and justice.”