SIMONE WEIL, the French philosopher and mystic, lived almost her whole life in wartime. As a toddler through the First World War, she gave up her pocket money to sponsor a soldier on the front. She fought within the Spanish Civil War. She spent the Second World War first in occupied France, after which with the Free French in London. She wrote and thought much about war. Now that war is once more raging in Europe, she has something to say to us on the topic.
Like her favourite philosopher, Plato, Weil often expresses her thoughts through analogies. “Suppose we see two men,” she writes: “one is running along erratically, jumping and shouting, while the opposite is walking quietly and steadily. To which one can we listen? Most people will listen to the person who’s jumping and shouting. But if we all know that each men are walking over burning coals, then the one who gains our attention is the one that is walking quietly and steadily. We wish to understand how he can do that.”
COINCIDENTALLY, the Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis, in his book The Fratricides, concerning the Greek Civil War (1946-49), uses the identical analogy. The hero of the book, a Greek Orthodox priest, Papa Yannaros, comes from a Greek village where the fire-walking ritual (the anastenaria) is traditional. By faith, he keeps going steadily through fratricidal times within the village where he’s a priest, while the opposite villagers turn to killing one another in a civil war. For each writers, in a world on fire, the Christian is the one that can walk steadily in times of trouble.
George Herbert expresses an identical thought. In his poem “Vertue”, he suggests that only a Christian can resist the fireplace that is popping the entire world to coal:
Onely a sweet and virtuous soul,
Like a season’d timber, never gives;
But though the entire world turn to coal,
Then chiefly lives.
THE ancient Greek phrase that Weil quotes most frequently is from Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War. The Athenians have conquered the small island of Melos. If the Melians don’t immediately give up, the Athenians propose to kill the lads and make slaves of the ladies and kids. Their emissaries explain: “The strong do what they’ll and the weak suffer what they have to.” For Weil, this phrase is the clearest articulation of the traditional belief that “Might is true,” as depicted within the Iliad (on which she is the creator of a commentary), whose poet expresses his regret that things must be so.
In the Third Reich, under which she resides, Weil finds the identical belief, that “Might is true” — though, somewhat than regret this state of affairs, the Nazis exult in it. Unlike lots of her contemporaries, Weil doesn’t see Nazism as uniquely evil (she dies before the total extent of the Holocaust became known). Rather, she sees it as an extreme manifestation of the world-view that “Might is true.”
In contrast, she believes that, somewhat than vilify those with whom we disagree by caricaturing them as mad or silly, we will combat all of them the more effectively once we’ve got understood the world from their perspective.
She also recognises that, while living in a rustic at war may severely restrict the liberty of its inhabitants, occasionally war will open up possibilities of motion that might not exist in peacetime. Through her contacts, Weil — a Jew, thrown out of her teaching job by the Vichy regime — is capable of get the commander of an internment camp for Vietnamese labourers dismissed by that very same regime for gross corruption.
WEIL was a Platonist each before and after her conversion to Christianity. For a Platonist, this world is a shadow of one other, more real world. In Plato’s analogy, we’re like slaves working on a rock face. All we will see is our shadows solid on the rock face by the sun behind us. The philosopher is the one who can turn from the rock face and start to look towards the sunshine. Having originally perceived the world as subject to “Might is true” (just as the traditional Greeks did), once Weil converted to Christianity, Plato’s turning to the sunshine meant for her a turning to Christ in prayer.
Prayer for her was at all times quiet prayer, where she simply waited for God to look, putting herself to 1 side. Prayer enabled her to experience one other, more real world, where true justice exists.
FOR the Christian, might shouldn’t be right, neither is it triumphant: evil has already been utterly defeated by Christ in his death and his resurrection. As Bonhoeffer writes in his poem “Who am I?”, composed in prison not long before his death, the evil we see around us is “like a beaten army, fleeing in disorder from a victory already achieved”.
Weil herself walked quietly and steadily through a world on fire — not only with war, but with injustice and oppression. In spite of this, as an expert philosopher, she carried on quietly and steadily writing philosophical articles, right as much as the time of her death, in Kent, in 1943. The lesson shouldn’t be that we must always grow to be philosophers: it’s that, in a world on fire, we must always carry on steadily and quietly doing good, based on the state of life which God has given us.
Dr Gervase Vernon is a retired GP.
