PALLE YOURGRAU
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few quotations that point, however briefly, to how Simone Weil, Pla–
tonist, Christian, and mystic, herself conceives of God (a conception in
which there can be heard echoes of Jewish mysticism) .
"Supernatural love," Weil writes in
Gravity and Grace,
"has no con–
tact with force, but at the same time it does not protect the soul against
the coldness of force, the coldness of steel. ...Armour, like the sword,
is made of metal. ...
If
we want to have a love that will protect the soul
from wounds, we must love something other than God." She finds God
reflected, as a father is reflected in the face of his son, not in what is
powerful but in what is beautiful. "Beauty itself," she writes, "is the Son
of God . For he is the image of the Father, and the beautiful is the image
of the good."
Of course we desire the beautiful. But for Wei!, "the beautiful is that
which we desire without wishing to eat it." Weil's death, in effect from
self-starvation, gives these lines a special poignancy. When I consume
something by eating it my digestion breaks it down and assimilates it to
myself. What was food becomes me. This may be an act of desire but it
is hardly a gesture of love. What Weil is darkly hinting is that "eating,"
assimilating to ourselves, is what passes for love in the natural realm.
We eat our friends and lovers. By contrast, the contemplation of another
being in all his reality and independent beauty "lets him be," as light
leaves undisturbed the reality of the beloved, revealing without con–
suming him.
Our desire for the beautiful, however, which is good, is easily cor–
rupted: "We are drawn towards a thing because we believe it is good.
We end by being chained to it because it is necessary." In how many
popular novels or movies does not a lover say to his beloved that he can–
not live without her? The only cure for this, says Weil, is love, but "love
is not consolation, it is li ght." Can we feed our all-too-human hunger,
however, on light? Not in the natural realm, the realm of gravity. What
is needed is something supernatural, which she calls "grace." "Privation
alone," says Weil, "makes one feel his need. And in the event of priva–
tion, one cannot help turning to
anything whatever
that is edible. There
is only one remedy for that: a chlorophyll conferring the faculty of feed–
ing on light... " "A [supernatural] chlorophyll conferring the faculty of
feeding on light"-this, surely, is Simone Weil's conception of the divine,
and it is as suitable a resting place as any on which to end.
