146 - Simone Weil and the Suffering of Love

Simone Weil and the Suffering of Love

By Eric O. Springsted

Cambridge, Cowley Publications, 1986. 131 Pp. $8.95.

In an age that has seen the emergence of absence and its attendant deconstructive brood of philosophical tropes, it is challenging as well as necessary to read, think, and live in the presence of the text. This requires a deep commitment and involves a substantial risk. Implicit in the openness it demands is the threat to one's fondly or furiously held positions. And, in the extreme, when the text is, for instance, none other than the life and thought of Simone Weil, it may even be a call to change one's life from the roots up.

Springsted acknowledges this crucial issue in the very first chapter of his new book on Weil. Although he asserts that we do not have to "recreate Weil's suffering in our life to appreciate her vision," the force

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of his conviction prevents us from approaching his book merely as a much-needed, systematic exposition of one of the most unsystematic, perplexing, and moving thinkers of modern times. Given the integrity of Weil's life and thought as Springsted presents them, we are confronted with difficult and radical choices and an appeal, though unspoken, to let her demanding vision re-shape our lives.

Focusing on suffering, the central feature of Weil's experience, Springsted points out that "in accepting and thinking through the fact of suffering she finds joy." In exploring this crucial paradox, Springsted touches on all the important Weilian categories, elucidating the relationship between suffering and her ultimate vocation of waiting. Affirming that her ideas on affliction, the most extreme form of suffering, hold a deep meaning for us today, he explicates Weil's belief that affliction does not negate love and goodness but perfects them. Springsted is at his best when he deals with the religious metaphysic underlying Weil's notion of affliction as the key to creation itself. He helps us see that affliction is ultimately grounded in God's own abdication of power at the moment of creation. Thus, following divine example, it can be for us a way of letting ourselves be de-created from out of our ego-bound perspectives. It opens up for us the condition of waiting which is for Weil "a state of permanent attention in which at every moment of our lives our own personal desires are suspended and we desire only and always the reality of things as they are."

While Springsted decries psychologically reductive readings of Simone Weil, he himself is all too aware of the peculiarities of her life and vision. "It is entirely possible," he suggests, "that Weil in her own life may have had a tendency to concentrate on perverse versions of sacrifice." Yet her profound and sustained reflections on suffering and other spiritual matters make it clear that she wished to see without self-deception. For someone as deeply aware of the workings of force and domination in life and history as Weil, suffering and sacrifice were not the esoteric practice of "passion mysticism." Springsted believes, that even in some of the "most bizarre aspects" of her life, she is a witness to the possibility that suffering opens up for us a way of being in the world with meaning and purpose, helping us trace in our lives the pattern of God's own self-giving.

As president of the American Weil Society for the past four years, Springsted has directed annual colloquies on Simone Weil that have generated many original viewpoints on Weil as well as steadily explored the possibilities and need for a Weilian spirituality in our time. Springsted's book is a serious contribution to this ongoing reflection. His focused treatment of the very core of Weil's concerns is bound to interest Weil scholars. At the same time, with his lucid exposition, often illustrating Weilian positions with contemporary experience, he puts the book within reach of readers who are relative strangers to Weil. Regardless of who turns to the book, however, one will find in it, as in

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any genuine and successful treatment of Weil, a call to transform the self in the presence of a suffering that stems from great love.

RALPH NAZARETH

Stamford, Connecticut