This episode is the first of a short series exploring How to Read Simone Weil. The author of *Gravity and Grace*, *The Need for Roots*, and *Waiting for God*—among many other essays, letters, and notes, Weil has been an inspiration to philosophers, poets, priests, and politicians for the last century—almost all of it after her untimely death. She understood, perhaps more than many other armchair philosophers from the same period, the risk of philosophy—the demands it made on a human life. In this series, we’ll feature three guests who look at this magnificent and mysterious thinker in interesting and refreshing, and theologically and morally challenging ways. We’ll look at Simone Weil the Mystic, Simone Weil the Activist, Simone Weil the Existentialist. First we’ll be hearing from Eric Springsted, a co-founder of the American Weil Society and its long-time president—who wrote *Simone Weil: Late Philosophical Writings* and *Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century.* In this conversation, Eric O. Springsted and Evan Rosa discuss Simone Weil’s personal biography, intellectual life, and the nature of her spiritual and religious and moral ideas; pursuing philosophy as a way of life; her encounter with Christ, affliction, and mystery; her views on attention and prayer; her concept of the void, and the call to self-emptying; and much more. **About Simone Weil** Simone Weil (1909–1943) was a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist. She’s the author of *Gravity and Grace*, *The Need for Roots*, and *Waiting for God*—among many other essays, letters, and notes. **About Eric O. Springsted** Eric O. Springsted is the co-founder of the American Weil Society and served as its president for thirty-three years. After a career as a teacher, scholar, and pastor, he is retired and lives in Santa Fe, NM. He is the author and editor of a dozen previous books, including *Simone Weil: Late Philosophical Writings* and *Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century.* **Show Notes** - Eric O. Springsted’s [*Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century*](https://undpress.nd.edu/9780268200220/simone-weil-for-the-twenty-first-century/) - How to get hooked on Simone Weil - “All poets are exiles.” - Andre Weil - Emile Chartier - Taking ideas seriously enough to impact your life - Weil’s critique of Marxism: “Reflections on the Cause of Liberty and Social Oppression”: ”an attempt to try and figure out how there can be freedom and dignity in human labor and action” - “Unfortunately she found affliction.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Philosophy is a matter of working on yourself.” - Philosophy “isn’t simply objective. It’s a matter of personal morality as well.” - ”Not only is the unexamined life not worth living, but virtue and intellect go hand in hand. Yeah. You don't have one without the other.” - An experiment in how work and labor is done - The demeaning and inherently degrading nature of factory work - Christianity as “the religion of slaves.” - Christianity can’t take away suffering; but it can take away the meaninglessness. - George Herbert: “Love bade me welcome / But my soul drew back guilty of dust and sin” - Weil’s vision/visit of Christ during Holy Week in Solemn, France: “It was like the smile on a beloved face.” - The role of mystery - Weil’s definition of mystery: ”What she felt mystery was, and she gets a definition of it, it's when two necessary lines of thought cross and are irreconcilable, yet if you suppress one of them, somehow light is lost.” - Her point is that whatever good comes out of this personal contact with Christ, does not erase the evil of the suffering. - What is “involvement in contradiction” - “She thought contradiction was an inescapable mark of truth.” - Contradictions that shed light on life. - Why mysticism is important for Weil: “The universe cannot be put into a box with techniques or tricks or our own scientific methods or philosophical methods. … Mystery instills humility and it takes the question of the knowing ego out of the picture. … And it challenges modern society to resist the idea that faith could be reduced to a dogmatic system.” - “Faith is not a matter of the intellect.” - “Intellect is not the highest faculty. Love is.” - “The Right Use of School Studies” - “Muscular effort of attention” - She wanted to convert her Dominican priest friend into the universality of grace—that Plato was a pre-Chrisitan.” (e.g., her essay, “ Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks”) - “Grace is universal.” - How school studies contribute to the love of God - Prayer as attention - Weil on Attention: “Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object. It means holding in our minds within the reach of this thought, but on the lower level and not in contact with it. The diverse knowledge we have acquired. Which we are forced to make use of. Above all our thought should be empty waiting, not seeking anything but ready to receive in its naked truth. The object that is to penetrate it.” - Not “detached,” but “available and ready for use” - Making space for the afflicted other by “attending” to them - Love that isn’t compensatory - “The void as a space where love can go” - What is prayer for Simone Weil? - Prayer as listening all night long - “Voiding oneself of secondary desires and letting oneself be spoken to.” - Is Simone Weil “ a self-abnegating, melancholy revolutionary” (Leon Trotsky) - Humility in Simone Weil - “The Terrible Prayer” - Was Simone Weil anorexic? - Refusing comfort on the grounds of solidarity - Self-emptying and grace - Accepting the entire creation as God’s will - Simone Weil on patience and waiting - “With time, attention blooms into waiting.” - “She’s resistant to the Church, but drawing from Christ’s self-emptying.” - God’s withdrawal from the world (which is not deism) - “A sacramental view of the world” - “ The very creation of the world is by this withdrawal and simultaneous crucifixion of the sun in time and space.” - (Obsessive) pursuit of purity in morals and thought - Iris Murdoch’s *The Nice and the Good* - “Nothing productive needs to come from this effort.” - “ She put her finger on what's really the heart of Christian spirituality. … We live by the Word … by our being open to listening to the Word and having that transformed into God’s word.” **Production Notes** - This podcast featured Eric O. Springsted - Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa - Hosted by Evan Rosa - Production Assistance by Emily Brookfield, Alexa Rollow, Zoë Halaban, & Kacie Barrett - A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about - Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
This episode is the first of a short series exploring How to Read Simone Weil. The author of Gravity and Grace, The Need for Roots, and Waiting for God—among many other essays, letters, and notes, Weil has been an inspiration to philosophers, poets, priests, and politicians for the last century—almost all of it after her untimely death.
She understood, perhaps more than many other armchair philosophers from the same period, the risk of philosophy—the demands it made on a human life.
In this series, we’ll feature three guests who look at this magnificent and mysterious thinker in interesting and refreshing, and theologically and morally challenging ways.
We’ll look at Simone Weil the Mystic, Simone Weil the Activist, Simone Weil the Existentialist.
First we’ll be hearing from Eric Springsted, a co-founder of the American Weil Society and its long-time president—who wrote Simone Weil: Late Philosophical Writings and Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century.
In this conversation, Eric O. Springsted and Evan Rosa discuss Simone Weil’s personal biography, intellectual life, and the nature of her spiritual and religious and moral ideas; pursuing philosophy as a way of life; her encounter with Christ, affliction, and mystery; her views on attention and prayer; her concept of the void, and the call to self-emptying; and much more.
About Simone Weil
Simone Weil (1909–1943) was a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist. She’s the author of Gravity and Grace, The Need for Roots, and Waiting for God—among many other essays, letters, and notes.
About Eric O. Springsted
Eric O. Springsted is the co-founder of the American Weil Society and served as its president for thirty-three years. After a career as a teacher, scholar, and pastor, he is retired and lives in Santa Fe, NM. He is the author and editor of a dozen previous books, including Simone Weil: Late Philosophical Writings and Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century.
Show Notes
Production Notes
This transcript was generated automatically, and may contain errors.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
Eric Springsted: Attention is not, in this case, noticing stuff. I mean, noticing is good. Paying attention to stuff and, you know, living an intentional life in spirituality is all important. What she really wants is this sense of open and ready to be you. That whatever it is, another person, uh, the mathematical problem, whatever, sort of enters in and takes you over.
And if you think of the psychology of that, it's really profound because we often want to pay attention to something in order to learn it, to master it, and then we can use, you know, and, and that's all to the good. But in fact, The moral concern that she's exhibiting here, particularly as you look at another human being, is that you're letting them into your life and you don't know what the hell is going to happen.
And in this case, that's where she's particularly concerned. This is how we can see the only way. that we can see affliction and those who are afflicted because we find them horrid, we find them repulsive, and we're scared to death that it could happen to us. Why are you going to open yourself up to that?
You can notice that, and you can give charitably, and you can Do all sorts of do gooding, but the sort of attention of even recognizing that the person's afflicted is very different. I mean, it means you have to make space for them. And then the person who no longer exists suddenly has a place in human society again.
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture.
On August 24th, 1943, 1943. A 34 year old woman named Simone Weil died in France. The coroner declared her death a suicide, cardiac arrest from self starvation. But the enigmatic Simone Weil was much more complicated than that, both in her life and her death. She had already been sick with tuberculosis, and in an act of solidarity with so many others in Nazi occupied France.
She willfully had reduced her rations to a minimum, and it wasn't the first time she'd opted for hunger or voluntary affliction in an act of solidarity. When she was six years old, she and her brother swore off sugar for the sake of the troops on the Western Front of World War I. Throughout her life, she identified with what she thought of as the soul destroying experience of demeaning labor, working class women, children, and men giving their experience a close, muscular attention, taking up their cause, and formulating a philosophical, theological, moral, and political perspective with the data of affliction, oppression, and death.
and marginalization. And not a little bit of Plato. Born into a secular Jewish family, she was exposed to Christianity early on, being drawn into a feeling of belonging. She provocatively wrote in her spiritual autobiography, About this early conviction that, quote, Christianity is preeminently the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belong to it, and she, among others.
When Simone was almost 30 years old, suffering from debilitating migraine headaches, she had what she thought of as a mystical encounter with Christ, while staying at a Benedictine abbey in Somme, France, listening deeply to the Gregorian chant during Holy Week, and attentively praying the lines of George Herbert's Love Bade Me Welcome.
She would write that, quote, Christ himself came down and took possession of me. This episode is the first of a short series exploring how to read Simone Faye, the author of Gravity and Grace. The need for roots and waiting for God, among many other books, essays, letters, and notes. They has been an inspiration to philosophers, poets, priests, and politicians for the last century, almost all of it after her untimely death.
She understood perhaps more than any other armchair philosophers of the same period, the risk of philosophy, the demands it made on human life. In this series, we'll feature three guests who look at this magnificent and mysterious thinker in interesting and refreshing and theologically and morally challenging ways.
We'll look at Simone Weil, the mystic, Simone Weil, the activist, and Simone Weil, the existentialist. First we'll be hearing from Eric Springstead, a co founder of the American Veil Society and his longtime president, who wrote Simone Weil, Late Philosophical Writings, as well as Simone Weil for the 21st Century.
We'll also learn about her perspectives on justice and her lasting influence on feminist writers from Cynthia Wallace, associate professor of English at St. Thomas More College at the University of Saskatchewan, and author of The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil, Feminism, Justice, and Justice. And finally, we'll explore Simone Weil, the existentialist, with Deborah Casewell, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chester, author of Monotheism and Existentialism and co director of the Simone Weil Research Network in the UK.
In this conversation, Eric Springstead and I discuss Simone Weil's personal biography, intellectual life, and the nature of her spiritual and religious and moral ideas. How she pursued philosophy as a way of life, her encounter with Christ, affliction, and mystery, her views on attention and prayer, her concept of the void and the call to self emptying, and much more.
Thanks for listening. Eric, thank you so much for joining me for a conversation. Thank you for inviting me to Hound. Tell me a little bit about why you got interested in Simone Weil. You've been, I imagine, reading and working on her for a long time.
Eric Springsted: Yeah, probably, well, I think 47 years. Yeah. I was an MDiv student at Princeton Seminary, and I had the good fortune of working with Diogenes Hill, and at that point, and this was the early 70s, He was working on Iris Murdoch.
And as a result of that, because Murdoch said she had borrowed so much from Vey, it started rating Vey. I was actually interested in Plato, but he said she has a lot of interesting things to say about Plato. So he said, why don't you try that? So I started to read her for the first time in 1975. been hooked ever since.
And I did my dissertation with him. And then after that, we both jointly founded the American Vey Society.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. You say you were hooked. Tell me a little bit about the experience of being hooked by Simone Vey. I gather that these days, Most people who are aware of her work know her as a mystic, maybe a Christian.
There's some question about the trajectory of her faith, but someone will offer a pithy quote. For me, I think it was the poet Christian Wyman. Right. Quoting her as a beloved influence in his early poetry. I think the direct quote was, all poets are exiles. And so there's a kind of, there's an intrigue, there's a mystique about Simone Zé, maybe even a kind of romantic quality to Her life and thought, what hooked you?
Eric Springsted: Well, actually, I think it was probably the Play Doh. I mean, one of the, what I discovered in her is I kept reading her and I think I was fortunate in just reading her in the beginning. And so I was able to mull it over. And, you know, somebody had once asked me, you know, well, how had she changed your mind?
The thing is that I was 24 years old. I didn't have much of a mind to change, or what I did needed changing. But reading her through all of those years, and including the beginning. It was a matter of her forming my thought, of actually thinking along with her. Where some people will say, oh, she really turned me around.
I mean, she's been a partner through almost my entire intellectual life. And in many ways, was the fulfillment of what I expected intellectual life and the life of faith to be.
Evan Rosa: You speak about intellectual life and the life of faith, um, tell us a little bit about that for her, biographically. And it does seem like the distinction between life and thought breaks down with Simone Weil.
For her, a way of being in the world is philosophy itself. Tell us a little bit about her history, personal life.
Eric Springsted: Well, she was the second child of a French physician and his wife, both bright in their own way. Her older brother, by three years, was one of the 20th century's greatest mathematicians. And so intellectual life within that family was extremely important for her.
She was never a person to sort of poo poo intellect in favor of action. However, one thing that became very important for her, When she was studying in the French lycee system, she taught by a French philosopher by the name of Alain, which was the pen name, his name otherwise was Emile Chartier. He very much had a lot to do with her Platonism, but he also insisted on thought making contact with it.
You never theorized. I mean, it was a matter of coming into contact with whatever object it was that you were trying to think about. In that sense, for her, intellectual life, which was philosophy, was a matter of an act of life. It was a matter of sort of experimenting with life itself to make thought realize itself.
Evan Rosa: But she seems to take it seriously at a level that is uncommon for a young person in general, perhaps at the time, but you get the sense that the level of seriousness with which she takes The idea is that she is in fact coming into contact with, encountering, or becoming acquainted with, as necessitating a kind of change of her own life.
Eric Springsted: Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, the milieu that she grew up in, intellectual life was extremely important. And the people around her would also have been just as serious about intellectual life. But where she was, again, different was the action that she felt that she had to commit herself to in order to finally figure out what was going on.
I mean, you know, probably the best example, uh, is when she was 33 or so. She had already written what she called her first grand oeuvre, which was Reflections on All Liberty and Social Prostitution. Uh, I mean, it was a wonderful piece. It's a great critique of Marxism. It's an attempt to try and figure out how there can be freedom and dignity in human labor and action.
And yet, a year after having finished this, She took a year off from teaching and went to work in three French factories doing piecework. Now, she thought she was going to find the final pieces by coming in contact with the workers. She thought she would find type of honest camaraderie that you don't always find among intellectuals.
And unfortunately, what she found was affliction.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Eric Springsted: But then that's a program for quite a while afterwards. Well, you dealt with that.
Evan Rosa: Say a little bit more about this retreat from intellectual life, I mean, for, for Weil. Because of her intellectual commitments, right? This retreat, I, it also reminds me, perhaps it's for a different, different, maybe vastly different reasons, but it reminds me, for instance, of Wittgenstein retreating to the hills of Austria to teach kindergarten or to build his own cottage or whatever.
There is a kind of, there's a kind of temptation to retreat that you kind of, that you seem to find in plenty of intellects. But, what was going on for Faith?
Eric Springsted: Well, I, Wittgenstein's the appropriate example. He had said, philosophy is a matter of working on yourself. And she, for never having read him or even heard of him, says pretty much exactly the same thing.
And that isn't a solipsistic, how do I perfect myself? If philosophy is a matter of thinking, it's a matter of making your thinking yours and also right. He had the same sort of strong moral concern about how thought goes. I mean, it's so easy, particularly in the modern world, to assume that the thought floats above everything, and observes it, Samus Nagel once said, the view from nowhere.
Perhaps that's what we aspire to, but both of them thought that's not simply objective. It's a matter of personal morality as well. And you just don't separate the two out. I mean, in that regard, it's platonic as well. Not only is the unexamined life not worth living, but virtue and intellect go hand in hand.
Yeah. You don't have one without the other.
Evan Rosa: So she was expecting to find community in the blue collar and worked in these factories in the hopes of, I mean, it seems out of solidarity, a moral commitment to solidarity.
Eric Springsted: That was a good part of it, but I mean, some of it was honestly an experiment to figure out how work was done.
Okay. And through her entire life, she had a real concern with this. Anytime she saw anybody working, whether it was as a farmer or as a harvester in the grape harvest or a fisherman, she wanted to join and she wanted to figure out how it was done.
Evan Rosa: That's incredible. And yet she finds affliction there in your words.
I recall her writing about the demeaning nature of factory works, that it was, that it was just so below the dignity of the human being that it, it, she found it probably, I think both physically and then spiritually just.
Eric Springsted: Yeah, I mean, she had, when she'd written that previous essay on the cause of liberty and social oppression, she had theoretically assumed that even though human beings always have to labor.
that it is possible to do that with dignity if one understands the necessity in it. I mean, even the science of it. And if one understands that, the logos of it, one can consent to it. I mean, it's really a very stoic position. But human dignity and freedom comes in consenting to the life that you have to live and not trying to keep kicking against it and trying to be something else.
The problem is, as you were saying, is that in this factory work, she realized that it was inherently degraded. I mean, not just sort of degrading, not just sort of, I don't want to do this, degrading. It was that in fact it destroyed the soul. And often when people talk about affliction, what they want to go to is something like the worst suffering they can imagine.
And yet the clear example she had of people who were afflicted were the factory workers. And they came to work every day. They went home to their families and probably drank too much and on the weekends, but you know, sort of normal people, but she began to realize there's nobody home inside. Yeah. And she would not say that she herself was afflicted, but she began to realize that.
And as sort of the whole system. weighs down on them. They start weighing down on themselves. There's a self hatred that goes along with it. And you just don't, she said, you don't recover from that easily. It has a certain amount of pain, so you can't use imagination to pretend you're somewhere else.
Evan Rosa: Does she draw this from her own experience?
Does she draw it from conversations with co workers or just reflecting on the process that she undergoes in life? Doing factory kinds of work.
Eric Springsted: I think some of it's her own experience. There was, she kept a journal while she was in the factory. And there's one really striking story that she tells. And she said, one day I was getting on the bus.
And it suddenly hit me how, for six soon, I can ride this convenient public transportation. She felt, I don't have any rights. Why would anybody let me on this? If somebody threw me out of the bus, I would have said, All right, you know, you're right. I don't belong here. And this is a kind of person who has a very strong sense of her own self.
And of her rights, and would argue with anybody about it, and then suddenly she gets a taste of this. And she realizes that's often the entire life. of people who are working in factories. She knows she can walk away. I mean, so in her experience, she's not saying I was afflicted and, you know, now I've come back to tell you about it.
She says, I was touched by it. And this is what I observed. And this is what is going on with people who are working in these factories all the time. Yeah. And she began to realize that these people are around us all over the place.
Evan Rosa: I wonder if you can help us get some context here. We know a little bit about her family and the kind of the place of intellectual life, the place of scholarship and the life of the mind, but what are her spiritual roots?
Because she becomes this deeply mystical person, mystical writer, and yet doesn't emerge from a religious background.
Eric Springsted: Yeah, well, what happened in the factory was extremely important because it shattered all of the confidence that you had, and including the idea that human beings, even if they were under harsh necessity, could consent to it and have some kind of dignity.
But you realize, no, it's actually possible to lose yourself, to lose your soul, to lose all sense of meaning. And she notes that it was shortly after that, uh, that her parents sort of rescued her. They took her on vacation to Portugal, and she had, what she said, was the first of her mystical experiences.
She had been, uh, watching a number of fishermen going out and they were singing ancient songs. And she said, it just dawned on me at that point, Christianity was a religion of slaves and that she couldn't help belong to it. So, I mean, suddenly she realizes And I think this is what's truly insightful in her case, and it's pastorally important.
Christianity was not meant to take away the suffering, but it took away the meaninglessness in the midst of suffering. When affliction could rip out our inner being, faith could possibly let us keep it. But she, but that assumption was also, or that thought. was that was not possible on our own. You know, we could not see the necessity, give consent to and save our, save ourselves.
Evan Rosa: This is like the role of waiting. Right. And the role of grace.
Eric Springsted: Right.
Evan Rosa: And this is where it really like begins to compound. So Christianity as the religion of the slave, I think that deserves a little bit of explanation. What does she mean by that?
Eric Springsted: I think we can go to another experience. She talked about three that were important.
Second one, she doesn't talk much about it. It was just that she was in Assisi and in the Church of St. Francis, and she said, something. you know, made me go down on my knees. And this wasn't a woman who went down on her knees very easily at all. But the third experience, I think, is really the important one.
And it gives a lot of context to what she's thinking. She was, with her mother in Solem, France, and they were, it was during Holy Week, they were going to the Holy Week services there in Solem, and the monastery there had a particularly interesting and different type of Gregorian chant. That's really what they had gone for.
But at that point, she was suffering from migraine headaches, and she'd suffered from them from the time of, you know, being a young girl. And it was excruciating, but at that point, she had met two young Englishmen, I think one very well may have been an American, and they taught her George Herbert's poem Love.
Love, they may welcome, but my soul drew back, guilty of dust and sin. And she memorized it, and she just would keep repeating it to herself. And she said, I realized that afterwards, that this was, this was, um, And then she said, in the midst of one of these services, as they were singing with each sound like a hammer to her head because of the migraine, that she had a personal visit of Christ.
And it's very interesting because she's very specific about how she talks about it. She says, it didn't make the suffering go away, you know, my flesh was still heaped up in the corner, but somehow there was also something of me somewhere else. And she said, it was like the smile on a beloved face. You can't doubt it, you know, somebody that you care about smiles at you, you know, exactly what's going on.
Yeah. And so she said, you know, I have refused my intellect. At that point, she realized that Christianity was not meant to get rid of something, but could make a use of it. And our affliction is utterly useless. It's just simply destructive to the human being. But in fact, in the supernatural, in God, in faith, she realized that somehow even affliction be a way of contact between human beings and God.
Because in fact, it stripped away all of the extraneous stuff. There was nothing left of your own ego, of all of your pretenses, and it was a pure and bright content.
Evan Rosa: I think we need to talk a little bit about the role of mystery then for her. Um, help us orient ourselves to I mean, it might require a brief word about like just the, a tradition of mysticism in general and the role and what mystery entails, but how does Simone Weil approach the question of mystery and especially when she is not one to easily or quickly leave the intellect behind?
Eric Springsted: Yeah. I mean, I think that's right. There are some. Philosophers, Heidegger probably being one of them, who I would say was a mystery monger. He's sort of delighted and obscured and pointing at high things. And it's interesting. Here is a genuine mystic, and she speaks a very plain language. She does not use jargon at all.
Uh, you know, I mean, like, like Wittgenstein, whatever could be said could be said thoroughly. Yeah. Yeah. But what she felt mystery was, and she gives a definition of it, it's when two necessary lines of thought cross and are irreconcilable, yet if you suppress one of them, somehow light is lost. So one can, needs to hold on to both of them, and you don't know how.
There is no way of defining it. Just even to give some sort of concrete example to that, go back to her experience in Sola. Her point is that Whatever good comes out of this personal contact with Christ does not erase the evil of the suffering. Her thinking, as she develops it from here on in, there is a type of good and evil that are compensatory.
There are pluses and minuses. against each other. But she believes that there is an absolute good that is not a compensation and does not erase the evil. And it's also, I mean, and it's, it's not on the level of the other type. So that type of good is a mystery. It's something that is complete, satisfying, et cetera, but it does not, it isn't pie in the sky and the sweet by and by.
It isn't a compensation. And that's the word she uses. It's not a compensation. Because if it were, it would be on the same level as the evil that it transcends.
Evan Rosa: In your book, you talk about mystery as drawing a person into involvement with contradictions as opposed to either, like, trying to smooth out. Erase, explain, resolve, solve them in any way. What is Vey's approach to involvement in contradiction? What is it to be involved in that way?
Eric Springsted: She thought contradiction was an inescapable mark of truth, you know, and she's very clear about this, is she writes on philosophy itself.
She thinks anybody who's getting rid of the contradictions and putting a system into place, and she thought Aristotle and Hegel were both guilty of this, are not real philosophers. Real philosophers are the ones who just live with contradictions. I mean, in that regard, she was very much like Mitkin said.
Right. The contradiction is actually a sign of depth. I mean, on the one hand, and this is very platonic, Contradiction pushes you to a higher level. If you're going to resolve it, if it's there, you're going to try and resolve it, and you're going to have to move to a different plane. But ultimately, she didn't think like Hegel did.
You're going to find the final solution. It was just simply beyond the human being that you can participate in. There's a light shed on that that, as you hold on to it, sheds light on All sorts of things of life.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. I want to camp out a little bit more on this because I think at a time where, where perhaps more scientific or philosophical approaches to faith more, I should say more rational approaches to faith seem to have been ineffective in retaining younger generations attention.
toward Christianity in particular, but perhaps religion broadly. I wonder about this kind of, the role of mysticism in this way and the role of mystery. And you talk about a few values or a few significant ways that mystery is very important for Ve. And The first is, well, I'll rehearse them here and you can see what sticks, see what jumps out to you now.
But what I've got, what I've noted is the universe cannot be put into a box with techniques or tricks or our own scientific methods or philosophical methods. Mystery instills humility and it kind of takes the question of the knowing ego out of the picture and it challenges modern society. to, to resist the idea that faith could be reduced to a dogmatic system.
Eric Springsted: Yeah. And I mean, I think all of those things are right. One thing I would add is that in the end, faith is not a matter of the intellect anyhow. I mean, the intellect is astounded. Yeah. Ultimately, mysteries, and this includes church mysteries, are not philosophical mysteries, but in fact, they're matters, she says, for contemplation, and hence for law.
If you wanna talk about something like a faculty psychology, what are our faculty intellect is not in the end, the highest faculty for her. Love it. Yeah. I mean in that sense. Right. And she probably would've resisted the designation, but she was very Augustinian. Mm-hmm . I mean, in that sense, very much. at the heart of what was the real heart of Christianity.
And intellect follows, and intellect delights in this. But in fact, it's very much a matter of understanding coming from faith.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, faith that seeks understanding or leads to understanding. This might be a good place to dip into the right use of school studies with the view to the love of God. I'm wondering about dipping in a little there.
In particular, what jumps out to me about this essay of hers is that really lovely distinction that she makes between muscular effort and negative effort. And she's talking about attention. And when we're talking about The faculties of intellect and love and, uh, a faith that leads to understanding. I just associate that with the kind of language that she uses about the attention.
You can give us a little bit of background, like what this essay is trying to do, where it comes from for her, and I'd really like to kind of, like, work out how the stuff about mystery and now faith that leads to understanding, how does that intersect with the concept of attention for a gay?
Eric Springsted: Well, the essay was written.
about 1942, 41, which is a late essay, right? Right. She was in Marseilles, the family had escaped on the very last train out of Paris before the Nazis moved in and they spent the next couple of years. She came into contact with a Dominican priest there and became very close to him, although in her own distinct way.
I mean, I think she wanted to convert her and she wanted to convert him. And she did actually. Um, she's been very asking you like convert him to what? To the universality of grace that Plato was a pre christian. You know, Guttmacher told us that he was, they had it all, they had it all worked out, and she wanted to argue, and she did.
I mean, many of her essays out of this time are on the ancient Greeks, which came out in a volume, but nice, Nicely titled, Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks. And includes a long essay on God and Plato, which was really lecture notes that she gave for the group that he had put together in Marseilles.
And yeah. She, he was always a little worried about sort of the peculiarities of her approach to faith, but he really was convinced in the end that praise was universal, uh, not exclusive to, to the Christian faith or particularly, uh, the Roman Catholic Church. Anyhow, he had asked her to write an essay for a girl's school in Marseille, a Catholic girl's school, and the essay was written for girls in high school, basically.
And the idea was how school studies actually contributed to the love of God. But the key to that was not just, well, you got smarter, you got more insight by doing this. It was, she said, it doesn't matter what the intellectual result is. If you're looking at a mathematical problem, and don't just screw up your face and have a muscular effort of trying to understand, but just looking at it and its insolubility, she says, that develops a challenge for you.
And attention, she in the end says, is ultimately what prayer is. Now, there's a particular, well, a definition that she gives in the midst of that essay. Yeah, she says the soul has to be unoccupied with anything else, and it needs to be, you've got to quote,
Evan Rosa: Well, I don't know. I'll read, I'll read this and you see if this connects.
Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object. It means holding in our minds within the reach of this thought, but on the lower level and not in contact with it. The diverse knowledge we have acquired, which we are forced to make use of.
Above all, our thoughts should be empty, waiting, Not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.
Eric Springsted: And those three adjectives, empty, detached, and ready to be penetrated, are the important ones. And the second one is particularly important, but it's a mistranslation.
I think it's a bad translation. Detached.
Evan Rosa: And what's the French?
Eric Springsted: The French is disponible, which is also a commonly used Spanish term. And it's a very concrete term. A line, and say it's a bank, and one of the tellers now, suddenly, the last customer's gone. That teller is now disponible, available. So detached, really, in that sense, is available, I mean, and it's not unattached, maybe, yeah, I mean, that would make sense.
But it all, but it is also sort of empty, but it's also ready for use. Attention is not, in this case, too many people end up making it, noticing stuff. I mean, noticing is good. Paying attention to stuff and living an intentional life in spirituality is All important, but what she really wants is this sense of open and ready to be used.
So that whatever it is, another person, mathematical problem, whatever sort of enters in and takes you over. And if you think of the psychology of that, it's really profound because we often want to pay attention to something in order to learn it, to master it, and then we can use it. Sure. You know, and, and that's all to the good, but in fact, the moral concern that she's exhibiting here, particularly as you look at another human being, is that you're letting them into your life.
And you don't know what the hell is going to happen. And in this case, that's where she's particularly concerned. This is how we can see the only way that we can see affliction and those who are afflicted because we find them horrid. We find them repulsive and we're scared to death that it could happen to us.
Why are you going to open yourself up to that? I mean, you can notice that. I mean, you can, and you can give charitably and do all sorts of do good. And one shouldn't prove that. But the sort of attention of even recognizing that the person's afflicted is very different. I mean, it means you have to make space for them.
And then the person who no longer exists. suddenly has a place in human society again.
Evan Rosa: That's very interesting because if that affliction was so destructive to their soul that this would be what, well is it right to call that a form of solidarity?
Eric Springsted: I don't think it is right to call it solidarity. I mean I've heard People talk about the same number of ways.
It's not empathy. I mean, empathy is our will to put ourselves in that other person's moccasins as if we're going to walk in them. This is, you don't know what's coming, but just simply out of some sense of love, you let them into your life. And the afflicted, as she says, often because of their own self hatred will react with savage ingratitude.
This isn't something that's going to happen and you're going to walk away feeling really proud of yourself. It's kind of, it's going to change your life.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. But it looks like it's necessitated by, I mean, the very fact of how she approaches philosophy as a practice of encountering. The object, when that object's another human being, it's, it's to come into full contact and then, but not a kind of not, maybe not in a completing way, in a way that now opens you up for the freedom of whatever that relationship could be.
And that is what is giving life to that. is there's no,
Eric Springsted: no relationship, actually.
Evan Rosa: Oh, really? No relationship?
Eric Springsted: Because, I mean, In this case, it's very different than boobers, I, thou. Okay. I mean, you're certainly not treating the other person as an it, and there's a sense in which it's, oh. Thou art thou, but it's not mutual.
I mean, there is no mutuality with somebody who's nobody. She's really very insistent about this. She doesn't want a payoff, other than perhaps the good that it may do the afflicted. But again, we don't know how they're going to react. So one just simply makes oneself open and available, and one recognizes it.
Now, the good that can come out of that, as I just mentioned, is that they've been excluded from human society. Human society, as we push and pull, you know, and there's a sort of mutuality in that. They are pushed, and that's it. And that's why generally even very kind gestures towards somebody who's in that position are going to push them over, even though you didn't mean it, because they don't resist.
In this case, for somebody to be actually void, and then ask, what are you going through? And they recognize that, that you're not trying to get something out of it. Suddenly they're given space to be a human being.
Evan Rosa: I mean, I've heard this phrase used of they, that into the void. I mean, that's a space where love can go.
Eric Springsted: And that's that sort of love and goodness that is not compensatory. That doesn't go into the void. All right. Yeah. A good that needs a compensation is never in the void.
Evan Rosa: Well, for they probably not even love.
Eric Springsted: Yeah, I mean, it could be an implicit one. I mean, she is a thinker, by the way, who thinks from the top. I mean, she thinks from the perfect on down. She doesn't move up incrementally. As Iris Murdoch once said, and I think she may have had they in mind, she said in the Sermon on the Mount, it's Being a perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect, not be ye therefore slightly improved.
Which is what all of his people really liked.
Evan Rosa: I want to ask a little bit more about attention, insofar as attention is identified. with prayer. So what is prayer for Simone Bey?
Eric Springsted: Attention to God. Yeah. I mean, it's very interesting. And I remember having taught this to seminary students. I once asked them, I said, in the middle ages, if somebody was to be knighted, he would spend all night in prayer.
How would you spend all night in prayer? And they would, they come up with all sorts of things. Well, they, somebody had learned what was called sort of the widening circle of prayer, so you pray for yourself and maybe your family, and then you pray for the people. People in the city of Santa Fe, and then you pray for the people of New Mexico, and then you pray for the people of the United States.
But you could do prayer by simply listening all night long. Simply having the desire to want to hear. I mean, prayer is contact between the human and the divine. I mean, certainly we have reasons to ask, and she probably wasn't very big on them, but I will say as a pastor, yes, you should ask. But that isn't all of prayer.
I mean, prayer is a mutual contact and therefore what is important is voiding oneself of secondary desires and letting oneself be spoken to.
Evan Rosa: And I think we need to talk a little bit more about this because perhaps one of the most significant Objections to Ve's thought that I'm aware of is that she's a self abnegating, melancholy revolutionary, to quote Leon Trotsky, I believe is what he called her.
But that self abnegation is really persistent and deep, or at least the abnegation. Maybe it just is, as far as you read. But I wanted to ask about humility in Ve, because read one. In one way, it's just about creating that void into which love can flow, a kind of perfect love that is only going to take place in a kind of perfect emptiness.
But what do you say to critics and detractors who think first of her maybe terrible prayer, the terrible prayer which asks for all sorts of harms to come to her, all sorts of lack and absences, and just really terrible things. What do we do with they when it comes to humility and the value of a poor sacredness, maybe even of a person?
Eric Springsted: Well, I mean, humility is absolutely crucial, but somebody who is self destructive is not necessarily humble. And I think she recognized that. And the self abnegation It may have been of the extreme ways that she approached it and, you know, may well have been a fault. She chiefly has criticized her anorexia.
And she just simply wouldn't eat. And that seemed to be a long term issue. Yeah. And it may
Evan Rosa: have well been connected to the migrant. In some of my reading, it seemed like she was doing it out of, again, there's that word again, but solidarity or some kind of identification with hungry soldiers on the front, whether that was or the, or others who were just afflicted and she felt a kind of obligation.
Yeah.
Eric Springsted: I mean, she would refuse highly ascetic way comforts, but I think you're absolutely right in the way that you put it, whether she was right or not. I mean, whether she was far into herself. Clearly, she always had a moral reason of solidarity with others. I don't deserve this comfort because somebody else doesn't have it.
I don't deserve this meal because somebody else doesn't have it. Now, I think that She probably was not medically anorexic, and she didn't eat a lot, but I don't think there was necessarily that sort of pathology, and in fact, it's an interesting story, a friend of hers in New York, before they went off to London.
with work with the Free French, had her over to dinner. And this person was also somebody from a secular Jewish background, but ended up being a convert. And they'd have her over to dinner, she wouldn't, she'd text, she wouldn't eat. But then the father would get her into an argument about the Jews, and she would just get so wrapped up in this conversation that she'd finish off the site.
Yeah. I mean, it really was an ascetic practice. It wasn't, it wasn't necessarily that. But to get back to the point you made, is that indeed, One needs to somehow empty oneself. She recognized, too, that you can't do that to yourself. In the same way you can't give yourself grace, you know. And at some point she said, you know, like a man who you can't be without money and give yourself a loan to tide yourself over.
And that's just sort of the negative part of it. You need to will, she says, it's like pulling up the plants. But the sun is the only thing that's going to make the plant grow. I mean, well, this pulls up the weeds so that it could grow. And in that case, the true self emptying comes because of light. It happens to you.
If you do it all the time, then it's simply pride, but it's a self accomplishment in a negative way. But what one has to do, and this is where attention comes is, you pay attention, you wait. And then grace happens to you. And by the way, it doesn't always have to be a way of suffering. And she points out there is a way of joy.
There is a way of intellect, and science and philosophy can be that way. Although in the end, they will all meet, because at some point what you've finally done is accepted the entire creation as God's will.
Evan Rosa: Can you say a little bit more about the role of waiting? And it seems to be Importantly connected to attention. Right. Pay attention and wait.
Eric Springsted: Yeah. And in fact, there's really even sort of little play on words in French there. Attention is you pay attention, but in time that blooms into a tant, which is weighted as a person whose wife is Consistently paying attention as a person who's waiting all the time.
And I would say that's something that you would find in monastic practice. Except she thinks that it doesn't have to be in a monastery. That it is what we should be doing in the world.
Evan Rosa: That really charts out a fascinating relationship to what What seems to be a kind of Christian framework that she's working within by the end of her life.
Eric Springsted: Yeah.
Evan Rosa: And as yet, she's so resistant to
Eric Springsted: She's resistant to the church. I mean, one thing that we haven't pointed out is the very obvious place that she's drawing this from. And that's Christ's self emptying. She will go on to say that God in creating the world didn't do it by power, but by withdrawing so that something other than himself could exist.
But that whole idea of withdrawing is drawn from the notion of the cross. Christ's kenosis, self emptying. in the incarnation and then the cross.
Evan Rosa: So in the, so here's another maybe mystery, another contradiction, right? And that in the withdrawing as the incarnation itself, there's a kind of
Eric Springsted: withdrawing isn't just going away and watching from the sidelines.
It's
Evan Rosa: not deism. So to speak. No,
Eric Springsted: it's not. And I mean, it's very Trinitarian because at the same time, the father withdraws and. Uh, the sun is crucified on time and space. I mean, so she thinks that the act of the crucifixion is historically real and pointed. It has to happen at a time and place, but she thinks she refracts it into eternity.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Eric Springsted: It's the very creation of the world is by this withdrawal and simultaneous crucifixion of the sun on time and space. Hence the world itself You brought up Judaism. World is not just a natural bunch of stuff. All that exists with it, with God in the middle of
Evan Rosa: it.
Eric Springsted: It's ultimately a sacramental view of
Evan Rosa: life.
That is a great word for it. I mean, and it's just, again, it's so fascinating to see it in, in a kind of thinker who blossoms from, I don't know, she kind of gets to that fundamentally sacramental. description of the world. Yeah. From a kind of agnosticism.
Eric Springsted: Yeah. And I think that, you know, something would probably be sad about that.
She said it was agnosticism said, I thought about God. I couldn't figure out the answer. So I left it alone. And then she talks about this personal conversion and she realizes that the intellect wasn't the way it wasn't the problem at all. Well,
Evan Rosa: yeah.
Eric Springsted: I would also say that the way that she approached this was, she didn't want to make a mistake.
And there was a quest for purity, which, you know, may have been obsessive at some point. But that quest for purity in morals and in thought was something that then bloomed into that notion of attention. She was waiting, in a way, and it happened. She hadn't betrayed And there's a, in Iris Murdoch's novel, The Nice and the Good, there's a guy who's a bit of a pharisee.
I mean, he's sort of nice. And then there's also another guy who's not so much, but he, he has a religious experience and it's precisely because of discipline that he's had beforehand that the experience actually he's able to act on, to make a life on, whereas it's not in the same novel. In the novel, The Unicorn, there's a guy who's a philosopher, egotist.
He has an experience of perfect love, and in three weeks it's gone. I mean, that tells us also something about faith as a real practice and a matter of an active mind. You just don't get hit by a lightning flash, and then everything changes. I mean, you're still you, and you've got to work with that. And if you haven't done much of a you beforehand, it's a lot, it's a lot harder than if perhaps you actually have been a decent person, not profound, but decent, that in fact you maybe had some control over your own body that you could live it out.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. That's bringing it back for me to, again, attention and her insistence. that nothing productive needs to come from this negative effort. And all of the productivity of muscular effort is just, could be for naught. It's just the making available of oneself in this negative effort and in a true giving of oneself to the attention as a practice, as just a right of life.
This is. The way that I follow, and that's again, like the kind of sa, the sacramentalism of the world may be creeping into the individual's life. Right? And it's perhaps a small comfort that now there, there is a livable way within this. There is at once a kind of adventurousness and maybe even a kind of heroism that shows up in va that and a, and a courage to her life.
That is daunting. And if it is that kind of negative effort of, of really just trying to let oneself be given to.
Eric Springsted: She put her finger on, that's really the heart of Christian spirituality. You know, I think even, uh, Colonel Bart would accept this. Hopefully she probably, I don't know what he would give us there.
But you know, the whole idea of we live by the work And how does that happen? You know, not by just sort of external manipulation, it's by our being open to listening. to the Word. I mean, back to Augustine, there's an inner person, there's an inner Word, who we are, and the whole point of Christian spirituality is listening to God's Word and having that transformed into God's Word.
Evan Rosa: Eric, this has been such a rich and delightful conversation about an absolutely mysterious, still to me, but all the better, Thinker, and Simone Bay. So thanks for your work.
Eric Springsted: Thank you. It's been a good conversation, which is always the best thing. Thank you so much.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Eric Springstead. Production assistance by Alexa Rollow, Emily Brookfield, Zoeë Halaban, and Kacie Barrett. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu or lifeworthliving.yale.edu, where you can find all sorts of resources including Past podcast episodes, articles, books, and so much more all to help people envision and pursue lives worthy of our humanity. If you're new to our show, hello, welcome. Remember to hit subscribe in your favorite podcast app so you don't miss the next episode.
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