Simone Weil on the Iliad: An Illuminating (but Failed) Interpretation
by Jeff Reimer
Feast of St Martin the Confessor, Pope of Rome; Holy Monday in East
Anno Domini 2020, April 13
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.
*
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.”
Jeff Reimer
is a freelance editor and writer based in Newton, Kansas.
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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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