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A Christian Theology of Other Faiths
By Diogenes Allen
"So often our theology of other faiths focuses on the doctrine of creation.... Or we emphasize that the Logos is present in all peoples. But Simone Weil's focus is on the Cross.... It is with the most distinctive aspect of our religion that she seeks to unveil a vital unity between our faith and the faith of other peoples. "
PLURALISM, whether racial, ethnic, or cultural, has forced Christians to rethink their understanding of the gospel. One major area where this is happening is in relation to other religions. There is a pressing need to develop a Christian understanding of other faiths, a way for Christians to make a valid place for them within their own faith.
But when this is attempted, a dilemma is encountered. There is a widespread desire to understand other religions as valid and significant revelations. Christians can go quite far in this direction, but they cannot apparently relinquish the claim that Christ is the savior of the world. If Christ were our savior only, he would be a parochial god; and that for Christians is impossible. He is either the one who died for the sins of the whole world or he is apparently not a savior at all. So we can either maintain Christ's uniqueness and indispensability for human redemption-and thus appear to condemn other faiths as inadequate-or we can accept other ways to God as equally valid, at the cost of giving up Christ as the prime and unique mediator of redemption. Both alternatives have been proposed, but neither seems to be satisfactory.
I believe Simone Weil avoids both horns of this dilemma by her understanding of the Cross. It is with this-the most distinctive aspect of our religion-that she seeks to show a vital unity between our faith and the faith of other peoples.
Unfortunately she died before her ideas could be presented in a connected and orderly way. So in this article I will try to reconstruct
Diogenes Allen is Professor of Philosophy, Princeton Theological Seminary. He is the author of Leibniz' Theodicy (1966), The Reasonableness of Faith (1968), Finding Our Father (1974), Between Two Worlds (1977), and Traces of God in a Frequently Hostile World (1980). Reference may also be made to the annotated bibliography which appears in this issue of THEOLOGY TODAY, "The Works of Simone Weil," by EricO0. Springsted.
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them. Because her ideas are fragmentary and even oracular, my presentation would need extensive textual argumentation to be sustained as a correct interpretation. So what follows is simply my understanding of her thought without the supporting data to establish its soundness. It is to be evaluated in terms of its theological merit, and not in terms of its exegetical accuracy. In addition, it is not claimed that Weil's views solve all our difficulties. But she bad a fresh, original vision and hopefully she can stimulate our imagination to think through the dilemma which the existence of other faiths presents for Christianity. This may lead us to a better understanding of the gospel and of ourselves as Christians.
I
For Simone Weil the entire creation, physical, social, and psychic, is to be identified with the Cross of Christ. The forces that form the fabric of the universe are the same forces which led to the crucifixion. Christ's death has universality because what came to a focus in Palestine to cause his death is also present throughout the universe. A specific understanding of creation is present in this claim, so we must begin with her remarks on the nature of creation in order to grasp her view of the Cross.
In Genesis, God utters commands and one thing after another comes into existence. That such commands are fulfilled instantly without apparent effort suggests that God's might is not the same as any other power. Nothing can resist God; for whatever "might" anything has depends on God's own power.
But more than power is needed to create. Dorothy L. Sayers and Iris Murdoch, both creative writers, claim that the creation of characters for a story requires some renunciation on the part of their creator. Writers must restrain their own personality to create a personality which is not their own. For something to exist which is not themselves requires them to renounce themselves. Good literature, they claim, is not an "expression" of a writer's personality, but involves an ethical act of self- renunciation so that something else might exist.
Weil has the same conception of divine creativity. The act of creation means that God allows something else to exist. Creation thus requires an act of profound renunciation. But there is a distinctive feature to God's renunciation. God does not need creatures in order to find life full, rich, and complete. God is perfection-a perfection which is dynamic and alive. So to create is a free act, not necessitated by any lack of fullness on God's part. So the Creator, with utter intrinsic fullness, freely chose out of love to have something else exist-to exist in its own right. It is created to be itself; to exist as something of interest and value in its own right. So to create a world means for God to renounce being the only existent-to pull back, so to speak, to give something else room to exist for its own sake.
Nearly all that God has created operates as it does in regular patterns
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without any choice. This is true not only of nature, but also of most human behavior. Our personalities and our social life operate for the most part as regularly as does nature.
This entire order Weil refers to as the realm of "gravity." One of its distinctive features is that in it everything operates by compulsion. In it everything goes as far as it can until it is kept from going any farther by something external to it. If it is an organism, its expansion is not only subject to external limitation, but another part of itself can check its expansion and limit its growth. All expansion and self-limitation of every organism are built into it, and every organism operates automati cally without the exercise of any choice. Our natural universe has for centuries been thought to be without choice in its operations. Increas ingly we have come to view more and more of our social and personal life as governed by laws, not by free choice.
In contrast to this realm of gravity there is another realm, that of grace. Its basic characteristic is that it does not seek to go as far as it can; it does not expand until it is forced to stop by external or internal compulsion. Its mark is voluntary restraint exercised for the sake of other people and things. It respects their reality.
The very creation of the world is an act of such grace. God does not seek to be all that there is, to be spread out, so to speak, to cover all that there is. But God graciously pulls back to allow a world to exist. This voluntary restraint allows for other realities. God holds back for the sake of the world. God is grace; the world is gravity.
Within the world of gravity there is at least one kind of creature that can operate according to the principle of grace and not merely by gravity-human beings. Most of our life is dominated by gravity. The human personality is similar to a machine. Just as a machine needs fuel to run and, unless this is replaced, it will run out of fuel and stop, so, too, we need to have our energy for action constantly replenished. It will be replenished either by the operation of gravity or grace.
Simone Weil uses an illustration of a family, one of whose members is an invalid. The invalid is indeed loved and cared for by the family. But in time resentment builds up because human love is limited. So the family does not have enough energy supplied by love to carry out the enormous task of taking care of the invalid day after day, year after year. Loved to start with, there just isn't enough fuel supplied by human love to keep on without drawing upon the energy that comes from resentment and self-pity. The family members, for example, complain to each other and sympathize with each other. This gives them some energy, or "fuel," to keep going.
Both the energy supplied by human love and by resentment and self-pity are part of gravity. One is attractive; the other is not. The amount of each form of gravity varies from person to person, but both spring from human temperament and make-up, and operate quite automatically.
People often begin with good motives. In taking care of a family
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member or helping a friend in need, people begin with the more admirable gravity of human affection. But if people are called upon to make more effort than their human love or affection can bear, then people are forced to draw upon the energy supplied by less admirable motives. How often have we, for example, taken on as a project to organize some charity from good intentions, and then, as the job becomes harder and harder, stick at it because we do not want the embarrassment of other people knowing we gave up?
Consider another example from Simone Weil. She says that as soon as one human being shows need for another, real need, there is a tendency for the person called upon to draw back. There are people to whom we respond when they express a need. But usually the need expressed is the sort of need which we like to meet, and from our response we feel some sort of gratification or fullness. The expenditure of effort gets replenished by such a feeling. But sometimes a person expresses a genuine need, and our initial tendency is to turn away. In this case we sense no possible return for our effort; we just feel an intimation of something to be drained out of us, and we react automatically by trying to get away. It takes effort to overcome this automatic response.
In all our actions there is need to receive the equivalent of what we give, even if it is only a smile or a feeling of self-praise from ourselves. We cannot bear the emptiness that comes from giving without some compensation to help fill it up. How resentful and angry we feel when for our efforts we get nothing! Have we not all felt and said with bitterness, "He did not even say as much as 'Thank you' for all that I did!" And we feel better for this expression of resentment. Energy is restored by the sense of superiority which comes from fixing our minds on the baseness of another person.
All this is the operation of our gravity. It dominates our actions and our thoughts. We act and think about ourselves and others in such a way as to protect our ego from irreplaceable loss and to compensate it for every expenditure of effort. We do this naturally, automatically. It is our gravity.
Gravity is created by God. It was created out of love, as we have seen. But it is also created as a means to love. As creatures we are to love God and each other. Even though we are gravity, we can receive divine love, and we can have our own actions rise out of this love. We are capable of belonging not only to the order of gravity, but also to the order of grace. Just as a machine needs fuel to run, so, too, we need to find incentive and energy to act and live. What can supply that energy-mere gravity or grace as well? In either case, we obey God as the source of both realms. But we obey as slaves when we follow gravity only, operating as the world of nature; we obey as children and heirs when we voluntarily consent to belong to the order of grace as well as the order of gravity.
This can occur because there is an emptiness at the core of human beings. Our gravity is to seek fullness from things of this world and from
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our relations with people. But we are like a leaky vessel; no matter how much we put in, we never get full because it keeps leaking out. As creatures of intelligence we can come to realize this. We then face the choice of submitting once again to the force of gravity at work within us, or facing the fact that we cannot make ourselves complete. If we renounce trying to give ourselves fullness, we by that renunciation imitate, whether we realize it or not, the very love of God which created the universe. To have done this is to have yielded to grace. Now a new principle is at work within us. Grace is lodged within the realm of gravity. Love itself has come into a creation made by love, finding its lodging in a creature.
II
With this conception of gravity and grace, we can now present Weil's conception of the Cross. Creation is an act of love because it involves God's voluntary renunciation as the only existent. The Cross is the great act of Jesus' renunciation of himself. He is the victim of the forces of gravity-the forces of self-expansion, the forces of self- aggrandizement which moved the empire of the Romans and moved the various aspirations of the Jewish people. These forces, of gravity, which make a complex pattern of interlocking, conflicting systems, catch him up within their workings and crush him. He does not know why he must feel the presence of his Father leave him as he is crushed by them. Although feeling forsaken, he remains obedient to the order of grace. He lays his life down humbly instead of following the route of selfassertion.
That his death was understood by his disciples to have been humbly accepted by him is indicated by the verse, "No one takes it [my life] from me. I lay it down of my own accord" (Jn. 10: 18). It was caused by the actions of gravity, but in the grip of gravity's vise, he yields himself up voluntarily. He accepts his vulnerability to the forces of gravity and to this event in particular which is brought on by their action, because he believes they are under the power, wisdom, and love of his Father. He therefore dies as a member of the order of grace, not as a slave to gravity. The love of the Creator- the love which restrained itself for the sake of the world's existence-is answered from the Cross by the Son. The Son restrains his own will by yielding it to the forces of a created universe that operates by gravity. In that crushing vise, he yields himself in faith that all this came from the Father for our sakes.
The Cross of Jesus is both the created universe and the wood to which he was nailed in Palestine. The Cross of Golgotha is the intersection of the forces of gravity, of which the universe consists, and grace. It is, on the one hand, the intersection of nature, as represented by the nails which caused blood to flow and death to come, and of expansionistic human institutions and human deeds which condemn him to the Cross; and, on the other hand, of a love which loves the Father in spite of being crushed and forsaken.
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With a view of creation as gravity, and Jesus as the incarnation of the Word of God, with whom and through whom all things were made, we have a picture of God as entering the order of gravity and bearing its full weight, bearing it as a creature, and bearing it humbly. Divine love is not just a creative love which renounced its unique status as the sole reality, but it is a love which allows its creation to be itself to such an extent as to enter its realm as a creature, subject to its workings, and to allow the creation to be itself even when it becomes destructive.1
III
The gravity of the universe, in its physical, social, and psychic form, is present everywhere, in all times and places. Gravity understood as the force which led to the crucifixion of Jesus on a piece of wood therefore means that something of the reality of the Cross is present universally. Weil claims that many people who lived before Jesus or who did not know of Jesus, knew his Cross under the form of gravity. She spent much of her short life seeking to document this claim. Here and there, especially in Homer, Plato, and Aeschylus, she saw an honest recognition and portrayal of gravity and the way all people are subject to it. Let us look briefly at her treatment of Homer as an illustration of this approach.
Homer's account of the Trojan War shows the sway of force as it touches all people, both victors and victims, until it reduces both to things. The person who wields a sword and strikes another down becomes as much a thing-like object, acting mechanically, as the person who is struck down.
The true hero, the real subject, the core of the Iliad, is might. That might which is wielded by men rules over them, and before it man's flesh cringes.2
Homer portrays both the Trojans, who are his enemies, and the Greeks, who are his compatriots, with the same sympathy and compassion. The Iliad is not a story of Greek triumph. It is about people caught in coils too strong for them to manage, subject to forces which even the gods, who arc immensely stronger than people, cannot control or manage. Gravity reveals itself more and more clearly as events go on, until victor and vanquished cease to be people, and have become reduced to things, obedient to forces that have established dominion over them.
It is this which makes the Iliad a unique poem, this bitterness, issuing from its tenderness, and which extends, as the light of the sun, equally over all
1 There are
other aspects to Weil's discussion of the Cross-especially the analysis of the
nature of Christ as the prime mediator, which I have considered in an earlier
article ("Suffering at the Hands of Nature," THEOLOGY TODAY, July 1980). In
that earlier article, Christ's affliction as the one who became sin for us is
the focus here, the universality of the Cross is stressed.
2 Simone Weil, Intimations of Christianity Among
the Ancient Greeks, trans. by E.C. Geissbuhler (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1976), p. 24.
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men.... The destitution and misery of all men is shown without dissimulaion or disdain, no man is held above or below the common level of all men, and whatever is destroyed is regretted. The victors and the vanquished are shown equally near to us, in an equal perspective, and seem, by that token, to be fellows as well of the poet as of the auditors (pp. 48-49).
Weil claims that no person could so honestly portray people at war, and have the whole work bathed by such beauty, compassion, and sense of solidarity with both victors and vanquished alike, as does Homer, without knowledge of a power utterly different from compulsion, of a power utterly different from gravity, namely, grace.
In a certain way, Patroclus occupies the central position in the Iliad, where it is said "he knew how to be tender toward all," wherein nothing of a cruel or brutal nature is ever mentioned concerning him (p. 44).
Again and again in various ancient Greek writings, she sees the contrast between gravity and grace, between brute power and social power, reducing people to things, and a witness to another power. Again and again she claims that those who portray such forces have an intimation of grace. Such people see themselves separated only by chance from those who are reduced to rubble. They know they could just as easily, for all they could plan or do, become caught in the mechanism and be crushed by it as well. So they are no better, no more meritorious than those who are crushed. "The cold brutality of the facts of war is in no way disguised just because neither victors nor vanquished are either admired, despised, or hated" (p. 50).
Such humility in the ancient writers indicates that they have learned to think of themselves and others as limited, dependent beings. They have recognized the sway of gravity and yet have not given their full allegiance to it. To withhold one's allegiance from gravity, even when one knows of no power that can defeat it or redeem it, is the result of the presence of God's grace, whether it is realized or not.
Weil claims that this has happened in many faiths and not just among the ancient Greeks. She finds it in the ancient Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh (having taken the trouble to learn the original language in order to read it) and in the sacred Hindu Upanishads. But she writes mostly about the ancient Greeks, especially Plato. Sometimes the intimations of Christianity may be exaggerated, such as, for example, the Trinity in Plato's Timaeus. But aside from some questionable interpretations, her basic claim that there has always been a witness to the Cross of Christ in all places and times is generally persuasive. It has not been known as a Cross, because it has not been known that the Word of God would become a person and endure the suffering caused by gravity on a piece of wood. Yet the universe which is gravity is what led to the crucifixion; it is those forces that killed him. So the Cross of Christ symbolizes the forces of the universe that came to a focus at Golgotha and pinned to a piece of wood the One by whom and through whom the universe was made.
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IV
Therefore, people in all places and times have had the opportunity to know gravity, and also the opportunity to refuse to give it their allegiance by showing compassion for those who suffer. They have thus had a witness to the Cross of Christ; and if Weil is correct, many ancient writings and religions give evidence that it has been perceived.
If the Cross is a truth that can be known at least in part from the very intersection of gravity and grace, why then does the Incarnation matter? She tells us that the Cross must not only be a truth stretched out for all time on the rack of the physical, social, and psychic universe, but it is also an event at a point in time and space. It is an event whereby that Cross is filled by God's own presence. The love which created the entire order moves inside that order and bears its full weight; so that Jesus on the Cross, God's love incarnate, bears the weight of the created order as a creature.
Weil never for a moment thought that those of other faiths would recognize her account of them as an accurate description. She was not proposing a new history of religions. She was instead suggesting a Christian theology of other religions-of how Christians should regard from their point of view the religions of other people. It is not a complete theology of other faiths. But she has uncovered one point of vital connection. It can give us a deeper understanding of the gospel itself, and thus new eyes with which to uncover still more connections.
So often our theology of other faiths focuses on the doctrine of creation to find a tie between other faiths and our own-but not a doctrine of creation which has the Cross integrally related to it. Or we emphasize that the Logos is present in all peoples. But Simone Weil's focus is on the Cross, the Cross which is historical, which occurred in Palestine. It is with the most distinctive aspect of our religion that she seeks to unveil a vital unity between our faith and the faith of other peoples. The Cross may not be central to their religion; it may be buried and hardly noticed. But nonetheless, she says, it is there. God is not left without a witness, nor has grace been unknown in lands far from historic Judaism and Christianity.
She believes that in the New Testament itself there is ample evidence for this claim. One of her favorite texts is the parable of the Sheep and the Goats. Those who showed compassion for those who are thirsty, hungry, naked, and in prison were recognized by the Son as belonging to him and welcomed by him into his kingdom, even though they did not recognize him as one to whom they had shown compassion. But he claimed to be present among those who were desperate. Those who are caught in the machinery of gravity share his Cross, whether they know it or not. So he identifies himself with them because the forces that have caught them in their grip and reduced them to people in desperate need of food, drink, and clothing are the same forces that led to his being nailed to a piece of wood. The compassion felt for them is for their
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condition, the same condition Jesus was in. To love them is to be a person who would have loved Jesus, if he had been known. Their ability to show compassion for those who are desperate shows that they are acting from the power given by grace; for to show compassion is to operate on a different basis than the social, psychological, and physical mechanism of the universe. On the other hand, Jesus rejected those who did prophesy, cast out demons, and perform "wonders" in his name, precisely because of their neglect of the hungry, thirsty, naked, and in prison. Not to love those in deep need is to lack the capacity to love him.
Those of other faiths (or even of no faith) in Christian or non-Christian lands may therefore belong to Christ. They may have a part of his Cross, without knowing that it is Christ's Cross, nor even that there is a Cross in which to participate. They may know only of the gravity of the created universe which sometimes puts people on its rack, and have compassion for them. But in the parable they are claimed by Christ as his own.
V
Weil did not think it worthwhile to send missionaries to tell devout people of other religions that they belong to Christ. She was in favor of missions only to those who did not know God in any form. Otherwise she thought it was wrong. She felt that to convert people from one religion to another would be like asking them to address God in a foreign language; they would always be less fluent than when addressing God in their own tongue. I do not know how serious an objection this is. It does not seem to me to be very formidable. I think that one who knows the Cross in the form of the adverse side of gravity ought to rejoice to know that God has come into the world to endure its effects in person. To know the Cross is one thing; to know that God was crucified is another. So if those of another faith have the first, they should rejoice to learn the second. A mission to devout people is not a mission to the damned; it is to bring them something only partly known, something about which they should delight to know. The problem is whether Christians who address others about God so understand the Cross themselves'?
At any rate, we have presented one way to recognize the universality of Christ. Something of the divine love he exhibited by humbly enduring the crucifixion in Palestine can be and apparently is known in another form by people in times and places beyond the bounds of Christianity. A knowledge of the Cross in the form of the physical, psychological, and social gravity of the world is universally available, and so is the grace of divine love.