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PARTISAN REVIEW
for all saints come from this world, from the world of alienation,
despair and dreadful anguish; they leave it. Once out, they are on their
own, and our world knows nothing of their salvation.
If
the term were
to have any meaning, we should need the example of a saint returning
to the scene of his renunciation, to the very beliefs he abandoned at
the start of his journey. I know of no such example, and it
is
curious
that even fiction is void of it. The great attempt in the Russian novel
was to document just such a turning full circle: Chichikov redeemed,
Alyosha become the Great Sinner, Nekhlyudov done wallowing in moral
sensualism over the fallen Maslova, discovering purity for himself–
but the return home was never more than barely outlined; it was not
written. Perhaps for the very good reason that it is impossible. The saint
leaves our world for good, as Simone Weil does when she says, "The
object of science is the presence of Wisdom in the universe . . . the
presence of Christ, expressed through matter which constitutes the
world." This bars her return; she is "their" kind of saint.
I don't know how serious Mr. Fiedler was in his use of the term.
Probably not very, as the whole tone of his argument derives from the
substitution of literary and rhetorical categories for religious ones. The
fact that Simone Weil's devotion had its absurd aspects seems to be of
greater moment to this argument than its devotional character. "The
Holy Fool" (she certainly was one) becomes synonymous with "The
Comic Figure" (which she was not); the implied equivalence between
the two terms is actually a derogation of religion, which must hold its
excesses to be sacred, not comic. The important distinction here which
Mr. Fiedler-he is not alone in this-fails to make, is between literature
and faith. (The whole contemporary inflation of "absurd" into a
religious term is based on this confusion.) So also when Mr. Fiedler
speaks of the other excesses of her life-her gaucheries, her asceticism
(she starved herself to death, refusing to eat, while in England, more
than the ration in occupied France), her hysterical identification with
the working class, which led her
to
work in factories at jobs she had no
business doing-he skips altogether the step necessary to the identifica–
tion, as though the absurd were
ipso facto
religious. But it is only when
a state is already of religious significance-and this is determined by
faith-that its absurdity becomes a way to God;
even
if it is absurd,
not
because.
Religion is not the only thing left out of this religious appraisal of
Mlle. Weil. One would imagine that a bestowal of sanctity from within
our world would at least be made in the appropriate context; so that
if
Mr. Fiedler is ready to celebrate Simone Weil as a religious figure be-
