“And Lead Us Not into Temptation, but Deliver Us from Evil”

In her letter titled “Hesitations Concerning Baptism” (January 1942), Simone Weil writes, “If I had my eternal salvation placed in front of me on this table, and if only I had to stretch out my hand to take it, I would not put out my hand so long as I had not received the order to do so” (Waiting for God, 15). Here we have in a single sentence her complaint and resistance to joining “the Church.” Salvation for Weil cannot be a one-and-done accomplishment guaranteed by a ritual — in this case baptism is the target. Salvation is daily work that must take place in a perpetual living in the present moment. We cannot bind the future to ourselves as a creditor binds a debtor through an IOU. This would be to bind the will of God to ourselves in such a way that we control his will.

Weil’s rejection of the one-and-done concept of salvation keeps her Christianity from becoming a membership organization where professing belief in a creed is the cost of entry. As such, her Christianity remains a practice that requires daily renewal. This daily renewal is the force of her meditation on the Our Father. Her meditation on the line “Give us this day our daily bread” is the firmest rejection of the one-and-done concept of salvation:

We cannot bind our will today for tomorrow, we cannot make a pact with him [Christ] that tomorrow he will be within us, even in spite of ourselves. Our consent to his presence is the same as his presence. Consent is an act, it can only be actual, that is to say in the present. We have not been give a will that can be applied to the future. (160)

Simple ritualistic actions like communion and baptism cannot bind the will of God to ourselves as guarantees of our salvation. This is the fundamental form of the Catholic Church that she rejects. Yet within this rejection she seeks a new agency — one that must operate in the present and is not aligned with an apocalyptic vision of the future where the actions of today are claims made on a future that God must remit.

In her meditation on the final lines of the Our Father (“lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil”) she weaves together three concepts that revitalize human agency without resorting to ressentiment-driven claims about the fallen state of this world and our souls’ need to escape from it: fear, confidence, and humility. As such, this vision of agency breaks with the ascetic ideal by reversing the claims that we make on God and history: God and history (the two are deeply interwoven in the lines “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”) make claims on us to which we have no choice but to respond. Daily preparation of our souls to respond with eternal love — by being in the world and not withdrawing from it — is the spiritual practice of saying the Our Father:

The Our Father contains all possible petitions; we cannot conceive of any prayer which is not already contained in it. It is to prayer what Christ is to humanity. It is impossible to say it once through, giving the fullest possible attention to each word, without a change, infinitesimal perhaps but real, taking place in the soul. (166)

The purpose of saying the Our Father is thus to incrementally and daily change our souls for the better. Saying it with “the fullest possible attention to each word” is to renew ourselves by preparing our souls to respond to whatever happens. Within this act of prayer that does not attempt to make salvation a binding claim on God — the issuing of a debt that He must repay — we can see the undoing of the ascetic ideal. This undoing restores ascesis (the very personal work of self-transformation) to aceticism (typically understood as self-denial and withdrawal). In asceticism and the ascetic ideal, we have the nihilistic valuation of the world in which we live. We seek various forms of escape (anachoresis) from this world through concepts of salvation. These concepts manifest themselves as desires for the end of history. They are eschatologies that envision the future as a repayment for our sufferings of the past. These eschatologies can be personal and occur after death by imagining “heaven” as an eternal personal afterlife, or they can take the form of apocalyptic visions of history where a savior (Christ, God, a fully self-conscious Working Class, a supreme leader, et cetera) finally shows up to set the world straight on our behalf.

In any of these cases, the ascetic ideal condescends to the present as an inferior or perverted form of the future. We must be careful with these concepts, however. It is entirely too easy to embrace the present as a form of resignation (159) and therefore passive nihilism. We must care about the future, but this care cannot and should not manifest as a desire for a permanent redemption. We will start looking for heroes as our redeemers. It is not coincidental that Weil was writing as a European witnessing the rise of Nazism in the West and totalitarian Communism in the East. Rather, Weil is much closer to Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History that looks backward at the catastrophe of progress as it is swept forward by a modern world constantly looking toward a redeemed future as it racks up the body count.

How does this care activate itself without renewing ressentiment and the ascetic ideal? If we’re not chasing a clear vision of a future salvation, how can we muster the energy to even care, let alone act? Paradoxically and counter-intuitively, she finds the answer in the trinity of fear, confidence, and humility. The three must work together to be effective as a new form of agency. I’ll take each one in turn.

Fear is the necessary disposition that occurs when we truly desire “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” In my previous meditation, I focused on this acceptance of the will of God as the Stoic act of imagining a providential universe. As with the Stoics, this belief in providence must be met with the acceptance that you cannot know what will happen in the future — providentia is experienced as fortuna. To keep this acceptance from becoming resignation, we must imagine this paradox as making a claim on us — as reversing the claim that we make on history to repay its debts to us. Accepting everything that happens as the result of God’s will is a spiritual technique that hopefully disables us from responding to our present circumstances with ressentiment. If we simply accept what has happened as neither right nor wrong with respect to ourselves, we can get on with the business of responding without ressentiment. Montaigne captured this Stoic sentiment beautifully in On Repentance: “Stoic precepts … indeed order us to correct the imperfections and vices we recognize in us, but forbid us to be repentant and glum about them” (617). As I mentioned in the previous meditation, we must be careful with this disposition. It can easily become a knee-jerk Panglossian passivity that simply accepts without responsibility the injustices that surround us. That is emphatically not what Weil is after.

What does all of this have to do with fear? Fear results from dropping any claims we have about providence favoring us. For Weil, to drop these claims (“to remit debts”) is to renounce our ego-centric selves:

To remit debts is to renounce our own personality. It means that we renounce everything which 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 it should be so.

This happiness is not, however, free of fear because it is purchased at the price of giving up a belief in our very selves as stable, long-term entities that make claims on history to do right by us. When we give up this notion of the subject, we are giving up a lot, especially the belief that we can be saved by a providential universe by simply undertaking one-and-done rituals:

Although the soul has received supernatural bread at the moment when it asked for it, its joy is mixed with fear because it could only ask for it for the present. The future is still to be feared. The soul has not the right to ask for bread for the morrow, but it expresses its fear in the form of a supplication. (164)

To live in the present moment while owning the sins of the past, but equally to not be able to bind the future as owing us salvation, this is truly fearful. What if I can’t muster the strength to renew myself? Am I lost?

Thus we arrive at humility — the deep realization that I don’t control the events of the future and that I can only somewhat control the present. Perhaps God will not grant me the grace needed to keep going. Perhaps Christ will not provide “our daily bread” that is needed to renew one’s energy to face the future with joy and fear: “Humility consists of knowing that in this world the whole soul, not only what we term the ego in its totality, but also the supernatural part of the soul which is God present in it, is subject to time and the vicissitudes of change” (165).

Fear and humility together, if the story ends here, is simply a recipe for self-nihilism. If accepting that we can’t bind the future to ourselves simply ends in humility, we have no incentive to get up each day and go out into the world. Binge-watching Netflix is a reasonable response. God could, if he so chooses, eliminate our souls altogether, which should be the greatest depth of our fear:

There must be absolute acceptance of the possibility that everything which is natural in us should be destroyed. It must be accepted as an event which would only come about in conformity with the will of God. It must be repudiated as being something utterly horrible. We must be afraid of it, but our fear must be as it were the completion of confidence. (165)

Confidence is the response that binds humility and fear in such a way that we can have agency without subjectivity. This confidence is the seat of our agency untethered from our need to find meaning in a final end point of history. But what are we confident about? How can we be confident if our confidence is not founded on a knowledge that we will be saved if we just follow the rules? In other words, on what ground does our confidence stand?

We must be confident in “our daily bread” as the infinite possibility for finite renewal. But this seems too easy to say to ourselves in the midst of uncertainty that we should just be confident in ourselves. It also sets aside the actual sentence in which she introduces confidence as the fulfillment of fear: “our fear must be as it were the completion of confidence” (165). Earlier she wrote, “We must go from confidence to fear” (164). How is it possible that we should imagine confidence as productive of fear? To make sense of this, we have to recall that this meditation on the Our Father is itself a spiritual practice. At the beginning of this spiritual practice is a choice to renounce one’s ego as the core of the self and as the entity that seeks to hold history accountable to its protection and fulfillment. When we let go of these claims, we are, by Weil’s account, letting go of our very personalities. We are letting go of the ego that gathers itself up and stares back at the universe full of ressentiment and demanding that the IOU be paid. Because this spiritual practice requires a renunciation of the self along with its claims for any permanent reward, it must be a confident choice that necessarily contains the seeds of fear within it.

The metaphors of thirst and hunger are important ways to understand how this works. Let’s return to the difficult passage about water and thirst:

We must not even become attached to detachment. Attachment to salvation is even more dangerous than the others. We have to think of eternal life as one thinks of water and dying of thirst, and yet at the same time we have to desire that we and our loved ones should be eternally deprived of this water rather than receive it in abundance in spite of God’s will, if that is even conceivable. (159)

The force of the metaphor is derived from the two sentences that introduce it. We must not form attachments to salvation as a desire for a permanent state of being. Put in terms of thirst, we cannot desire the absolute and eternal end of thirst. Rather, we should desire that our quenching of thirst only be momentary and that thirst should eternally return as a desire for us to quench it again. To make this more clear, when we sit down to dinner, we don’t imagine than the food we eat will bring about the permanent end of hunger. Our appetite, like thirst, will return, and in doing so, we will experience the renewed joy of eating once again — perhaps in community with others sharing a similar joy.

To “desire that we and our loved ones should be eternally deprived of this water” is to wish for the cyclical nature of spiritual renewal. “Eternally deprived” does not have to mean that you never get to drink or that you are permanently thirsty. A more consistent reading of Weil would translate this as never attaining (or wanting to attain) a permanent state of satiation. Thus we must continually return to the well to satiate thirst while believing that this satiation is only temporary. “Give us this day our daily bread” is the acknowledgement that renewal is necessary and that the desire for a permanent end to our hunger is profoundly misplaced. Confidence as the seed of fear is the acknowledgment that eating the daily spiritual bread will temporarily end our hunger while living with the simultaneous confidence and fear that one will need to seek this renewal yet again. This is not Camus’ Sisyphus’ absurd task that is built on nothingness. This is the task of daily renewal built on a confidence that renewal, like thirst and hunger, can be momentarily satiated. And, when satiated, we can return to the world with a transcendent energy “that is a real energy; it performs actions through the agency of our souls and bodies” although “We cannot store it” (161).