January 2017 – godblog

Simone Weil and Donald Trump, the world as force and affliction.

Simone Weil wrote during the years leading up to the Second World War. She died in 1943. There is much that is curious and troublesome about her life—and death. She died of starvation by her own hand. Born a Jew, Weil is generally regarded as a Christian mystic. Until the end of her life she refused baptism. I see her as a woman with deep insight into the experiences of force and affliction. We all know who Donald Trump is.

“The Iliad, a poem of force,” her most well-known work, addresses the founding document of Western Civilization. Generally seen as an epic of war and heroes, Weil reads it as an account of what force does to people: those who use force, and those who suffer it. It subjects both to the empire of might.

Whoever does not know just how far necessity and a fickle fortune hold the human soul under their domination cannot treat as his equals, nor love as himself, those whom chance has separated from him by an abyss. The diversity of the limitations to which men are subject creates the illusion that there are different species among them which cannot communicate with one another. Only he who knows the empire of might and knows how not to respect it is capable of love and justice. (p. 181)

We live in an age of force, and contempt for those who suffer it. “Loser” has become a common term of abuse. About the concept of a loser, Weil reminds us that Christ was the greatest “loser” of them all. He lost so that we might be saved.

Weil’s is a heretical reading of the New Testament. Christ is the incarnation of God, come to earth to suffer as men and women suffer, and to die as testimony to this fact. The resurrection, so central to Christianity, is unimportant to her.

If the Gospel omitted all mention of Christ’s Resurrection, faith would be easier for me. The Cross by itself suffices me. (Weil, Letter, p. 55)

Resurrection is not important because Christ represents not God’s power, but his willing weakness, a rejection of all who equate God with might. Instead of being a God of might, God is the one who becomes one with the victims of history.

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Kierkegaard and the leap to faith.

I’ve decided that the only way to understand religion is in terms of what Søren Kierkegaard called the “leap.” (CUP, p 340) He never used the term “leap of faith.” I’m still struggling with Kierkegaard. My post is a series of comments on some important ideas of his. There are others.

I am particularly interested in the religious implications of his earlier works, those not explicitly Christian. When people refer to Kierkegaard as the first existentialist, it is to these earlier works that they refer.

One influence on my decision to study Kierkegaard was reading some of Reinhold Niebuhr’s sermons, prayers, and religious essays (2015). Far from being a “Christian realist,” as I may have portrayed him here, Niebuhr was first of all a man of faith. But what does this mean?

Truth as subjectivity

It means that through an act of “imaginative reorientation,” one chooses to see the world as gift, and Christ as our savior, because doing so makes life more meaningful. Reasons can be given, but the world as gift and Christ as savior becomes a reality by acting as if it were so. This is what Kierkegaard means by “truth as subjectivity.”

Truth is not just a proposition. Truth becomes a way of life. This is exemplified in Christ’s claim that “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). Christ not only claims to teach the truth; His life is the truth (Evans, p 62). Our lives can never be the truth, but we can seek to make the ideals represented by Christ’s life and teachings our own, in so far as this is humanly possible. In this way faith becomes a reality.

Continue reading Kierkegaard and the leap to faith