The SPCK Introduction to Simone Weil by Stephen Plant

Author:Stephen Plant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SPCK

The love of God and affliction

Weil’s analysis of these questions used the word malheur – meaning not merely unhappiness or sorrow, but affliction – a condition compounded of pain and distress. Weil began by making an important distinction between suffering and affliction.

Affliction, Weil argued, ‘is inseparable from physical suffering and yet quite distinct’ (WG 77). It is perfectly possible, she wrote, to experience suffering without experiencing affliction. Take the example of toothache. At the time one experiences toothache, it can be excruciatingly painful. However, an hour or two after it has been fixed, it is easily forgotten; it leaves no mark on the soul. Suffering of physical pain on its own causes neither degradation nor hopelessness. Affliction, on the other hand, reaches deep down inside the soul. It is, she wrote,

… an uprooting of life, a more or less attenuated equivalent of death, made irresistibly present to the soul by the attack or immediate apprehension of physical pain. If there is complete absence of physical pain there is no affliction for the soul, because our thoughts can turn to no matter what object … Here below physical pain, and that alone, has the power to chain down our thoughts …

(WG 77)

But, it might be objected, there are many terrible human ex-periences that apparently have no element of physical pain and yet are profoundly hurtful to the soul. To Weil, this was quite true. However, her definition of ‘physical pain’ included several kinds of experience in which the body is outwardly undamaged. To Weil, for example, fear of torture should be regarded as causing physical pain, even though the body remains untouched. Similarly, when a loved one dies, even though there is no bodily wound, the grief that follows is experienced as though it were a physical pain, with difficulty in breathing, a sensation of unfulfilled need, even of hunger for the person who has been lost. Furthermore, when simple physical pain extends over a long time, its repetitive recurrence can lead the soul into genuine affliction. To Weil, this in-sight was clear from her own debilitating migraine headaches.

For Weil, then, the defining characteristic of affliction is that it is total. There is not real affliction ‘unless the event which has seized and uprooted a life attacks it … in all its parts, social, psychological and physical’ (WG 78).

To a person in the grip of genuine affliction, God seems absent, the soul is filled with horror as it is flung an infinite distance from God, and time stretches on ahead filled with nothing but interminable pain. To Weil, such affliction is so horrific that the soul would rather escape from affliction than death. In the light of this description, one truth about affliction becomes crystal clear:

It is wrong to desire affliction; it is against nature, and it is a perversion; and moreover it is the essence of affliction that it is suffered unwillingly.

(GWG 87–8)

Total affliction, Weil believed, is rarer than one might im-agine. To be created does not necessarily expose us to affliction, but only to its possibility.

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