PA RTISAN REVIEW
III
a Catholic cabalist, how close you never realized to the line of Jewish
mystics, to Abulafia, who scrambled Holy Scripture, free-associating
until secrets revealed themselves, ecstatic word-games where you
might have found the intoxication with Logos which you attribute to
the Greeks and Christ.
But was not your shame the most extreme of all? And is not
the vocabulary of those who must posit a spiritual equivalent for
the actual body terror of that body? The Rabbis would insist that
a man's life be the mark of his philosophy, and despite your talk
of universal drunkenness and the bread of a Messiah in which you
shared, your death, refusing to eat because of your compatriots in
France suffering under the Nazis, was an example of horror, of a
vocabulary made actual again through self-mortification. So it was
not Noah you imitated with his one drunken lapse but a romantic
Christ, suicide, an example.
Such shame you must have had, such sickness. I dread it. And
it qualifies your account of Noah, for what is such praise of drunken–
ness but terror of abstinence? Did not the Nazarite Samson perish of
lust? And what did those Pharisees whom you so hate counsel but
to recognize that the consciousness of man is bound up with an
animal hunger in this human life and one must not be allowed to
overwhelm the other.
Simone Weil, Saint Teresa, the daughters of Judaism, mad–
dened, holy, possessed with a lust, secret and furious, girls who
burned to look upon their father naked.
