“And Forgive us our Debts, As we Also Forgive Our Debtors”

In her commentary on this line of the Our Father, Simone Weil has a lot to say, starting with this:

At the moment of saying these words we must have already remitted everything that is owing to us. This not only includes reparation for any wrongs we think we have suffered, but also gratitude for the good we think we have done … Our debtors comprise all beings and all things; they are the entire universe. We think we have claims everywhere. In every claim which we think we possess there is always the idea of an imaginary claim of the past on the future. This is the claim which we have to renounce.

To have forgiven our debtors is to have renounced the whole of the past in a lump. (Waiting for God, Routledge Edition, 162)

This is a difficult passage to unpack, and a certain application of its basic ideas may seem downright wrong and even offensive. Aren’t we bound to remember history or be doomed to repeat it? Should we forget the Holocaust? What about reparations for American slavery? Are those off the table? Shouldn’t we hold the past accountable for its sins that we are living with in the present? I don’t think that these are the questions she is raising in this commentary. She is writing a very personal meditation on the Our Father as a prayer that should be said daily as an act of spiritual and ethical renewal that overcomes nihilism. Though Weil was deeply political, it seems to me a mistake — it is always a dangerous mistake — to seek a political program as an extension of anyone’s personal, individual practices. A mediation on renouncing debts owed and incurred need not be extrapolated as a Kantian Categorical Imperative. If we go looking in this reading of the Our Father for a universal pronouncement about the human condition, and if we extrapolate this into a vision of society, we will set up new debts to pay and thus a new “imaginary claim of the past on the future.” Extrapolating this spiritual practice into a larger vision of society, history and the state will demand from everyone — will make a new claim on everyone and impose a debt that must be repaid — that we all forget and that we all ignore history because that’s what we think makes up a healthy individual. Ressentiment will always remain close at hand to fuel those claims and demand that everyone pay the debt. This is what happens when any politics is extrapolated from a vision of the healthy individual.

……….

Side note: I am reminded of an earlier meditation on Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents where I focused on his claim near the end that to extend his vision of psychoanalysis into a theory of Kultur is dangerous: “But we should have to be very cautious and not forget that, after all, we are only dealing with analogies and that it is dangerous, not only with men but also with concepts, to tear them from the sphere in which they have originated and been evolved” (147). The same warning applies here. It is one thing to offer up therapeutic techniques (such as prayer and psychotherapy) designed to help individuals deal with the world, and quite another thing to extend the psychological and physiological assumptions that underly those practices into a normative prescription for economic, political, cultural and social power that would enforce a singular vision of the healthy individual.

……….

No. We must learn to renounce our tendency to seek a permanent connection that would bind the past to the future in the form of debts and claims owed to us. (The lines I quoted at the start say nothing about debts that we have incurred — we are not off the hook for our injustices. Weil makes this clear in her meditation, but it often goes unnoticed.) If I hold back from my tendency to extrapolate this into a political program and take seriously her meditation on the Our Father as a meditation, then I see pathways opening up that undo the ascetic ideal, nihilism, and ressentiment. In my own meditation on this meditation, I want to explore those paths to see where they take me. In the process, I’m going to have to pass through the middle section of her meditation on this one line that delves into how we hold onto claims and how that holding on is self-poisoning. I believe that, in my own reading of her reading, that there is something here that shows us how to push through the ascetic ideal using its own practices and concepts against it so as to overcome its power — a power that is rooted in seeking a stable self that wants to make claims for itself, others and the world that must be repaid. These claims are fueled by ressentiment and nihilism. Our ability to renounce them is core to our ability to let go of nihilism without trying to annihilate it with ressentiment.

An oversimplified reading of her meditation on this one line is tempting. It seems on the face of it that to forgive others who have done us ill is a good thing. Even to renounce our demand for gratitude from others to whom we’ve done a good turn seems noble and Christian. No controversies here. But if we turn our attention to the idea that we should forgive ourselves for the debts we’ve incurred in our behavior to others seems awfully difficult to stomach. What else could she mean by renouncing all claims that bind the past the future? While we forgive others in our debt and release our claims upon them, how can we justifiably release ourselves of the reparations we owe to others? Isn’t that up to them? Should we never apologize and try to make amends when we’ve done something wrong?

Clearly any cursory understanding of how Weil lived her life — with a “heart that beats right around the world” as the other Simone of the time (de Beauvoir) once put it — should disable us from such a reading. No, this is not what she is saying. Let’s look at some crucial lines:

In renouncing at one stroke all the fruits of the past without exception, we can ask God that our past sins may not bear their miserable fruits of evil and error. So long as we cling to the past, God himself cannot stop this horrible fruiting. We cannot hold onto the past without retaining our crimes, for we are unaware of what is most essentially bad in us. (163, emphasis added)

These are powerful sentences but are easily misunderstood. If we read these sentences through the ascetic ideal, we easily find “evil and error” as fundamental conditions of our soul — as the truths of ourselves that must be acknowledged yet never eradicated. That is not what she is saying. Her target in this passage (and in the rest of her meditation on this prayer) is our tendency to “hold on” and to “cling to the past” as themselves the causes of sin. They are not caused by a sinful nature, though that reading is possible. Rather, we embed a sinful nature in ourselves when we hold onto the past as the retention of crimes — ours and others. Said more clearly: to hold onto the past can create the effect of an embedded original sin at the seat of our identities.

To renounce “all the fruits of the past” is not to renounce our desires nor our bodily selves. She has nothing to say about these things in this meditation. It is to renounce our tendency to see the world as something that owes us something. Fundamental to our ability to make these claims and issue these debts (her focus is on the debts we owe) is to embrace our egos as stable entities that judge whether or not the world has done us right. On the flip side where she is talking about the debts we owe to others, when we “ask God that our past sins may not bear their miserable fruits of evil and error,” we are asking that they not fester within ourselves to somehow make us think that we are inherently evil. The “miserable fruits” are not inherent and inevitable growths of the tree; they are actively cultivated when we hold onto our momentary sins to make them permanent states of our souls.

Hers is not a reading of the Our Father that reinforces and solidifies the ascetic ideal. Weil is preventing, not encouraging, the formation of the Christian “bad conscience” that Nietzsche identified. The Christianized bad conscience is the reversal of ressentiment from an outward projection of anger at a hostile world (GM 1.10) to an inward absorption of that anger as a permanent state of guilt. Ressentiment enforces debts and makes claims about how the future owes us something that must be repaid. If it doesn’t, we feel that injustice is done and we are entitled to hold the world and others accountable to our claims. If it doesn’t deliver, we hold the world in contempt.

For Nietzsche, this is a problem of “breeding”; for Weil it is a problem of “bearing fruit.” But for both, the problem lands at how ressentiment becomes the basis for the formation of ourselves as subjects — as stable selves that can make promises, incur debts, and enforce the repayment of those debts — whether they are owed to us or we owe them to others: “To breed an animal with the right to make promises — is not this the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man?” (GM 2.1). “The principal claim which we think we have on the universe is that our personality should continue. This claim implies all the others” (Waiting for God 163). The formation of stable selves, for both Weil and Nietzsche, is tied to a kind of personality that sees itself as a creditor and a debtor, that sees itself in terms of claims made and debts owed. To see oneself this way requires that the past and future be bound together by debts and claims. Failure to remit payment is to invite nihilism. In such a situation, ressentiment stands at the ready to activate contempt, which can be more or less violent. It can project outward as it seeks its revenge — real or imagined. It can fold inward as it becomes a form of guilt because we haven’t lived up to the claims that the universe makes on us.

Weil wants to release herself from ressentiment. This release requires renunciation of permanent claims just as Nietzsche requires active forgetting as a healthy state of letting go of our grudges against ourselves and others (GM 2.1). For both, our very identities are at stake: our ability to hold on — to “not have done with anything” (Nietzsche) or to “see claims everywhere” (Weil) — is the problem that leads to nihilism. For both, the power of renunciation and active forgetting is not a self-denial, but is the way in which we purge ourselves of the bad conscience of the ascetic ideal:

To remit debts is to renounce our own personality. It that we renounce everything that goes to make up our ego, without any exception. It means knowing that in the ego there is nothing whatever, no psychological element, which external circumstances could not do away with. It means accepting that truth. It means being happy that things should be so. (Waiting for God 163)

This doesn’t mean that we ignore the debts we owe others and never make amends for the wrongs that we’ve done. Nor does “accepting that truth” mean embracing a passive nihilism toward oneself. She wants us to learn how to renounce seeing ourselves as part of a universe that owes us something or that we are somehow inherently sinful and evil. She is seeking, through the Our Father, daily renewal. This daily renewal of life is simultaneously a practice of daily spiritual “death”:

The forgiveness of debts is spiritual poverty, spiritual nakedness, death. If we accept death completely, we can ask God to make us live again, purified of the evil which is in us. For to ask him to forgive us our debts is to ask him to wipe out the evil which is in us. Pardon is purification. (164)

Again, we must not be tempted to read “the evil which is in us” as an essential state of being — as our inheritance of an ineradicable Original Sin. This is not a consistent reading of Weil. Rather, we must see this “in us” as something that we put there by habituating ourselves to see the world through the lens of ressentiment. Our grudges, our claims, our belief that “we have claims everywhere” (162), and the “emptiness which makes us think we have been cheated” (162) are simply ways of holding the world in contempt. If this world isn’t arranged that way — if it does us wrong — our dormant ressentiment will arise with all the bad consequences that follow in its wake.

To renounce this view of ourselves and the world is not to give up our agency. It is to give up our ressentiment-based agency to find a new way of living and responding to events. It is a form of acceptance that is not resignation — acceptance as resignation is self-nihilistic. Weil’s answer to nihilism is in the combination of “Thy will be done” and “Give us this day our daily bread.” But this must be taken up in another meditation.