mysticism and masochism

on simone weil and cataphatic mysticism

In June 1310, in a Parisian public square, Marguerite Porete was burnt at the stake for heresy. She refused to cooperate with the ecclesiastical authorities who had judged her book of mystical theology, written in the vernacular, as heretical. The mysticism for which she was executed was profoundly apophatic, containing a boiling desire for self-abandonment: in approaching union with God, the soul is annihilated, returning to its ultimate source. ‘By his works which have stripped me of myself absolutely and have placed me in divine pleasure without myself’: the ultimate abdication of the will, the drive for self-destruction overcoming the tenacious will to survive. Will must turn against itself in service of God.

Anne Carson, in her collection Decreation, points out that this self-annihilation presents a paradox for the writer: in following Marguerite’s mystical path, ‘such a soul passes beyond the place where she can tell what she knows. To tell is a function of self.’ This paradox within apophatic mysticism goes beyond writing: just as Marguerite refused to submit to ecclesiastical judgement, so Simone Weil refused baptism, trusting rather in her own exegesis of the Christian tradition. In rejecting the self, the material world, the relation of bodies, these mystics clung to a gnosis which reified the ego, elevating the self in its relationship with God even as they claimed annihilation. In Gravity & Grace, Weil wrote of the necessity to remove the obstacle of humanity for God’s love for God’s self: ‘if I only knew how to disappear there would be a perfect union of love between God and the earth I tread, the sea I hear.’ All human relationships, all acts of love, are a barrier: ‘Remedy: apart from the ties of brotherhood, to treat men like a spectacle and never seek for friendship; to live in the midst of men as in that crowded railway carriage between Saint-Etienne and Le Puy. . . . Above all never to allow oneself to dream of friendship. Everything has to be paid for. Rely only on yourself.’

‘May God grant me to become nothing. In so far as I become nothing, God loves himself through me’ — at the age of thirty-four, in an English sanatorium, Weil starved herself to death. Asceticism is another paradox: depriving itself of food, the body becomes more aware of hunger. The mind generates self-obsession, focusing above all on the object of denial. The desert fathers had remedies for this — distraction, prayer — but even so their own struggles became paramount: the cosmic battle between good and evil played out in the desert in a singular fight between the body and the assaults of the devil, the holy man as warrior, his own psychic struggles elevated to the level of salvation of all humanity. The development of cenobitic monasticism was in some sense a remedy against the libertarianism of the desert.

Last summer, while I was meeting a Catholic priest for catechesis, I came across this phrase in the catechism: ‘Sustained by divine grace, we respond to God with the obedience of faith, which means the full surrender of ourselves to God and the acceptance of his truth insofar as it is guaranteed by the One who is Truth itself.’ The phrase full surrender stuck with me.

Kenosis: Christ ‘emptied himself, taking the form of a slave.’ Weil: ‘The abandonment at the supreme moment of the crucifixion, what an abyss of love on both sides! “My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?” There we have the real proof that Christianity is something divine.’

This is Weil’s proof text: suffering without consolation, which nevertheless does not degrade the soul. In her essay ‘The Love of God and Affliction’, she writes, ‘at the very best, he who is branded by affliction will keep only half his soul.’ Affliction is her theodicy: the enigma that God ‘should have given affliction the power to seize the very souls of the innocent and to take possession of them as their sovereign lord’. Affliction is not merely the distance from God, but absence: ‘the soul ceases to love, God's absence becomes final.’ For God Himself to experience this absence, and to go on loving, to become the void which is filled by God, is redemption.

In mortals, to go on loving in affliction is inconceivable without grace. Both grace and affliction destroy the self; when this double destruction is joined, the soul is a mirror of the crucifixion. Not a union with God, as such, but a correlation, so immense and holy as to reach apotheosis: the heroic deification of the Greeks.

Redemptive suffering. If a human being who is in a state of perfection and has through grace completely destroyed the ‘I’ in himself, falls into that degree of affliction which corresponds for him to the destruction of the ‘I’ from outside—we have there the cross in its fullness.

This analogy is worked out most concretely in Weil’s commentary on the Iliad. She has a Hobbesian sense of human nature and human life: ‘the strong are, as a matter of fact, never absolutely strong, nor are the weak absolutely weak, but neither is aware of this.’ Violence is an essential feature. Violence degrades both the afflicted and the afflicter; both are ‘turned to stone.’

Weil’s Christianity goes beyond neoplatonism to gnosticism: such is her respect for Hellenism, which she frequently contrasts with the Jewish tradition. In her essay ‘Human Personality’, she writes of an ideal Christianity ‘pure and uncontaminated by the Roman, Hebraic, or Aristotelian heritage’ (Levinas was notably critical of her antisemitism). Her commentary on the Iliad is an ode not to heroism, but to the clarity of vision with which Homer and the Greeks recognised the violence and domination that makes up the essential basis of human life. ‘Both the Romans and the Hebrews believed themselves to be exempt from the misery that is the common human lot.’ Only by recognising the necessary movement towards affliction—the gravity, hard and uncompromising—were the Greeks capable of love and justice. The Gospels were ‘the last marvellous expression of the Greek genius… the accounts of the passion show that a divine spirit, incarnate, is changed by misfortune, trembles before suffering and death, feels itself, in the depths of its agony, to be cut off from man and God.’

She wrote about the Iliad in 1940, immediately after the fall of France, and it is a landmark of philosophical pessimism. Her heroes are damned, not glorious: ‘The human race is not divided up, in the Iliad, into conquered persons, slaves, suppliants, on the one hand, and conquerors and chiefs on the other. In this poem there is not a single man who does not at one time or another have to bow his neck to force.’ For Weil, as for Nietzsche, God is dead, but there is no übermensch: humanity is entirely enslaved and lost, absent any hope beyond the chance movements of grace.

Like Carson, Elizabeth Hardwick regarded Weil with a frustration that is common to her readers — ‘the stubborn willingness to suffer, the aura of a willed immolation’. Despite her devotion, Simone Weil never accepted baptism, believing the Church too marred by error and the sin of collectivism. Despite her writing on humility, she elevated her own intellect and insight with the conviction of genius. The tragedy of her life was to bequeath a corpus on the subject of submission of the will, even annihilation of the will, without admitting the fallibility of her own judgement. T.S. Eliot, in his preface to her Need for Roots, acknowledges her ‘difficult, violent and complex personality.’ It is a personality which, echoing the themes of her work, invites attention and generosity: patience, re-reading and a willingness to suspend judgement. But these were not virtues which Weil, intellectually at least, exercised towards others.

In Susan Sontag’s essay ‘The Pornographic Imagination’, discussing The Story of O, she writes, ‘In the vision of the world presented by Story of O, the highest good is the transcendence of personality. The plot’s movement is not horizontal, but a kind of ascent through degradation… What Story of O unfolds is a spiritual paradox, that of the full void and of the vacuity that is also a plenum.’ Submission, here in its sexual context, is understood in the same neoplatonic terms as Weil’s decreative mysticism. As the saint ascends to God by self-annihilation, so the submissive ascends to sexual fulfillment through self-denying acts of obedience and masochism. The pinnacle of submission is a state of ecstatic transcendence wherein the submissive loses all sense of body, time and boundary. At this level of experience, any sense of oneself as a thinking, feeling being is annihilated; even pain is overcome. ‘I remained in a passing away in my Beloved, so that I wholly melted away in him and nothing any longer remained to me of myself’ — this is Hadewijch of Brabant, a thirteenth-century mystic, describing her encounter with Christ in the Sacrament. ‘I fell into a state of darkness, of dissolution, of loss of my being, when I was so completely at his mercy that I only existed to receive him, and if he had not been inside me I could have melted away into nothingness’ — this is Edith Templeton in Gordon, a novel published and rapidly banned in 1966, describing the state of mind achieved at the hands of a sadist.

Both sexual submission and apophatic mysticism rely on an illusion of submission which paradoxically invests in one’s own will, which is why neither Marguerite Porete nor Simone Weil could acknowledge any authority other than their own. ‘Step by step she becomes more what she is, a process identical with the emptying out of herself,’ writes Sontag. In Weil’s geometrical vocabulary: the upward movement of annihilation of the will (the Pseudo-Dionysian via negativa) runs parallel with the inward movement of glorifying the will by investing it with the characteristics of sanctity: power and purity.

The masochist divests from moral responsibility, allowing herself the illusion of inculpability; by being hurt, she is able to momentarily deny her own capacity for harm. By transferring control of her will to another, the submissive is released from the obligations of adulthood and the weight of responsibility, not only for herself but to others. This kind of submission, the kind that pursues self-negation, is really a negation of one’s place in a human community, one’s duties towards others and the guilt and shame of failing to live up to them. It is also illusory — the submissive consents, sets the terms and can end it at any moment.

Deleuze, in Coldness and Cruelty, points out that the masochist thinks in terms of contracted alliance; she divests from personal control and invests in the contract, the law. She imagines the dominant as a tyrant with unlimited power, though in reality his power is limited by the agreed terms. Submission takes on a bureaucratic element: not the abdication of will but its dissembling, a series of veils obscuring the raw fact of moral responsibility. The terror of embodiment, the anorexia of mystics, the masochism of ascetics: at the root of these is an awareness that being in the world means being with other bodies, other personalities, whom one will always fail.

The crucifixion is unique as a moment of self-annihilation which is unconditional and uncontracted: it is simply a gift of love. Rather than fleeing the messiness of human community, Christ’s self-emptying on the cross allows for the fullness of life to be realised — the purpose of individual life fulfilled in the resurrected body; communal life in the New Jerusalem. Christ’s sacrifice is the model for a cataphatic mysticism, a via positiva, which denies the self in service of others. If self-annihilation turns attention inwards, exalting the self, then turning attention outwards, towards others, necessarily minimises the self. Surrender, then, looks more like Christ washing the feet of his disciples:

So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. Very truly, I tell you, slaves are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.

Cataphatic mysticism involves fewer fireworks and ecstasies. Rather than the ascent and descent of Pseudo-Dionysian theology, it moves outwards and inwards: mission, hospitality, prayer. ‘Ask and it shall be given to you, seek and you shall find.’ It encompasses the works of mercy, the hard work of forgiveness and reconciliation, the frustration and irritation of sticking with people we don’t like very much or don’t want to be around. It is the Little Way of Thérèse of Lisieux, devoting oneself to the ordinary business of loving other people and recognising the beauty and value in each of them. Rather than locking the mystic to God in insular union, it embeds her in a web of relationships and communities. Common life necessitates a mature understanding of one’s responsibility towards others, whereas self-annihilation makes personal responsibility impossible. It follows that a cataphatic mysticism would reject the hatred of the body common to the via negativa, recognising the body as a gift which enables common life and all the risk it entails — eating, drinking, loving. Christ’s surrender on the cross is completed with His resurrection and the promise of transformed, perfected, embodied life. The promise of the new creation is not that risk will be averted, but that finally we will be able to see each other face to face. The beatific vision shared out.

Simone Weil was right to say that, in affliction, there is a powerful desire to retreat inwards, to focus only on survival and deny one’s responsibility towards others. But in removing the possibility of moral action in affliction, she denies holiness, which is always extraordinary and unreasonable. The superabundance of grace means that even the most devastated of people are capable of forgiveness and self-giving love. In his moment of agony, Christ cried out ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me’, but also ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’