“Bearing Witness to the Differend”: Simone Weil’s Relational Soul

In “Forms of the Implicit Love of God,” Simone Weil offers a vision of the Christian soul that reverses its vertical and atomizing orientation that is the Catholic legacy that I grew up with. That legacy sees the vertical relationship with God as essential to salvation. It is an orientation that finds the meaning of life beyond and out of this world. As such, it is an orientation that struggles with the horizontal dimension — our relationships with other souls. More specifically, the vertical dimension of the soul actively and intentionally devalues the horizontal dimension to focus solely and completely on its own salvation — on its own relationship to God. “Are you right with God?” is the common refrain of this form of Christianity. Being “right with God” is to hold onto a set of beliefs in doctrinal truths about who Jesus was and what was/is his relationship to God. We are saved if we are willing to say “Yes” to these doctrinal truths. Christianity is thus about a profession of beliefs rather than a set of spiritual practices.

This has the immediate and inevitable effect of atomizing and individualizing the soul. If your salvation is up to your willingness to profess belief in doctrinal truths, then it’s all on you. If salvation is found in the great beyond (and not in this world), then your horizontal relationships will tend toward one-dimensionality: other human beings either help us or hurt us in our individualized quest for salvation. Within this atomizing practice of the soul, nihilism and ressentiment are inherent, to borrow some terms from Nietzsche. Nihilism because this vertical orientation requires a renunciation and denial of horizontally oriented desires and passions — both good and bad — that are the substance of living with others. In this brand of “negative nihilism,” life on earth is actively devalued in favor of placing life’s true value and meaning in a realm other than this world. Ressentiment because this powerful denial of passions and desires requires an active suppression of these forces that so desperately want to act out their anger as vengeance on a hostile world.

The “man of ressentiment” fashions his soul through a continuous and ongoing effort to devalue horizontal relationships and align them with his individual vertical relationship with God. To devalue something is emphatically not to empty it of value as if we are revealing the thing’s natural state. This is the move of a knee-jerk Existentialist. To the contrary (and following Nietzsche) devaluation is not stripping of an illusion that reveals a primordial lack of value. To devalue something is a kind of contempt that is an active depreciation. To say that this life is an illusion and that our reality is found in the beyond is to actively place a value of “no value” or “less value” on the horizontal dimension of the soul. To devalue, to finally put a point on it, is not to recover some true and original “lack of value” at the heart of existence. It is to say definitively to our existence here on earth, “Because I am right with God, you don’t matter all that much.”

To sum up this orientation of the soul in terms of the flow of energy: it withdraws from the world in order to push its energy upwards in an attempt to connect with God in the great beyond. This withdrawal had a name in the early centuries of Christianity, particularly in the Egyptian desert: anachoresis. I’m going to spend time in this mediation unpacking this term by continuing my close reading of the final chapter of Peter Brown’s The Making of Late Antiquity — a series of lectures given at Stanford in the 1990’s. But for the moment, I want to call attention to this flow of energy that renounces the engagement with the world to channel that energy upward and into an individual relationship with God. This channeling is not simply one way: it is not purely a flow from the outside to the inside. A great deal of energy has to flow outward horizontally so that it can be re-absorbed and redirected vertically. This is very similar to how the explosion of an atom bomb has been observed. There is first a “blast-wave positive phase” that reaches out as a highly destructive projection from ground zero. Immediately afterward, however, “a negative phase sets in, in which the winds reverse to blow toward ground zero.” The intensity of the movement outward suddenly reverses to flow back inward and upward. In Nietzsche’s terms, the active forces of the blast wave become reactive and turn back to the origin point and channel much of the energy upward.

This movement of intense personal energy outward-reversal-upward is fundamental to the spiritual practice of anachoresis as practiced by the Egyptian monks. As such, anachoresis is fundamental to the “triumph of reactive forces over active ones” to borrow a phrase from Deleuze (reading Nietzsche). This triumph is the victory of ressentiment as a type (or mode) of subjectivity. (Deleuze made this the central theme in Nietzsche and Philosophy.) Brown encapsulated this beautifully in his Stanford lecture:

… the Desert Fathers lavished the most meticulous attention on those links that bound men, disastrously, to other men, and not on the links that bound men’s souls to their bodies. Alongside a “vertical” imagery by which the soul demonstrated a closeness to a “heavenly” source of power by brutal triumph over the “earthly” region of the body, we find equal prominence given to a forceful “horizontal” imagery. Even in its most personal and private acts of mortification, as when he triumphed over the needs of his own sexuality, the ascetic was seen as acting out a dramatic and readily intelligible ritual of social disengagement. As a result, “heavenly” power on earth came to be associated less with an intangible relationship to the other world and more with a clear ascetic stance to this world. A relationship to heaven was shown most irrefutably by a move to the desert. (87)

Put simply: the vertical closeness to God is made possible by a highly visible horizontal expenditure of energy that actively devalues “the links that bound men, disastrously, to other men.” The movement of energy flows first outward as an active depreciation and negation of those links that are invested with a lot of emotional energy. One just doesn’t disappear into the desert passively. “Social disengagement” as anachoresis takes a great deal of effort and energy to invest life in this world with a pervasive negative quality that requires a total withdrawal. Anachoretic salvation starts by devaluing social engagement. Thus anachoresis and renunciation are simply precursors to the channeling of the energy back into the self and upwards to God. The phase one “blast wave” reverses to become the inward flow back to and upward from ground zero.

In the hands of the Desert Fathers, anachoresis becomes a continuous spiritual practice that reactivates and channels nihilism and ressentiment. To make this clear, we should understand that, for the farmers of the Nile Valley, anachoresis was not necessarily nihilistic. It did not require placing a negative value on the things of this world. The withdrawing farmers were simply escaping the “tensions of living in the ‘world’ [that] had proved unbearable” (82). Nihilism and ressentiment, however, were central to the all-encompassing practices of anachoresis created by the Desert Fathers. Anachoresis became not only renunciation of existing social relations, but renunciation of the desires and passions (logismoi) that connected the individual to his (old) community and to his (old) self. This was an inward reversal of energy that would channel that energy upwards to a personal/atomized relationship between oneself and God. Again, this is emphatically an atomizing dynamic:

The hermit was regarded as a man who had set about finding his true self. By the fact of anachoresis, he had resolved the tension and incoherences of his relations with his fellow men. In the desert, he was expected to settle down, in conflict with the demonic, to resolve the incoherences of his own soul. The powers the ascetic wielded came from a long process of self-discovery….

Hence for all the many accounts of confrontations of the ascetics with the demonic, few spiritual traditions have placed such a ferocious emphasis on self-awareness. Self-awareness and awareness of the demonic form a pair. (89, 90; emphasis added)

Reading this passage through Deleuze-Nietzsche, the victory of ressentiment consists in reactive forces cutting off the desire for action. The man of ressentiment says, “This world is evil and I must disassociate my self from it because I am better than it.” The result is a type of subjectivity — a mode of constituting one’s relationship with oneself — that actively devalues and renounces the passions and desires that connect this self with this world. The result is an individualized and atomized subject that is on a personal quest for salvation. The soul is conceived of as bottled up inside the individual so that it can focus on “the beyond” as an individual relationship with God/Truth. This truth is found within oneself and is discovered through renunciation of one’s passions and desires. Renunciation thus becomes the active and continuous devaluation of this life in the here and now. I must emphasize again that the devaluing is an active choice — it is the placing of a lower value on the horizontal orientation of the soul so that higher value can be placed on the vertical orientation. It is clear that this devaluing requires energy directed as a positive choice to depreciate social and political life. In saying no to the social, the ascetic may want to think that he is exposing a natural and inherent lack of value (i.e., Existential nothingness) as the default human condition. But to see life in such terms requires a value of nil to be actively placed on social and political life.

The spiritual practices of anachoresis and renunciation are therefore not passive neutralizations of one’s horizontal relationships. They require hard work and the positive identification of an external enemy against which one can project anger and a desire for revenge. This energy gets reabsorbed because it cannot act out its desire, either because it is not physically stronger than the enemy or because some other “reactive forces” cut off the desire for action:

… slave morality from the outset says No to what is “outside,” what is “different,” what is “not itself”: and this No is its creative deed. This inversion of the value-positing eye — this need to direct one’s view outward instead of back to oneself — is of the essence of ressentiment: in order to exist, slave morality always first needs a hostile external world; it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all — its action is fundamentally reaction. (Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, 1.10)

To say that “its action is fundamentally reaction” is to make a fundamental connection between ressentiment and nihilism. For Nietzsche, reactive forces are active, but they are active in their negation of externally directed action. This is a subtle but important point for understanding the atomizing practice of the Christian soul. The “man of ressentiment” starts from a negative premise that leads to a positive self-affirmation: this world is evil, therefore I am good if I hold it in contempt. Or, by recognizing that the world is evil, I have already demonstrated my goodness. Ressentiment (as the external projection of an accusation against the world) starts with nihilism (as the active choice to devalue the world as evil).

Both Nietzsche and Deleuze are clear that these reactive forces, when they become fully baked as ressentiment, are stronger than normally active forces: “It is not sufficient for [reactive forces] to hold back from activity: they must also reverse the relation of force, they must oppose themselves to to active forces and represent themselves as superior…. Morever it is thought that more (abstract) force is needed to hold back than is needed to act” (Nietzsche and Philosophy, 123; emphasis added). To put it succinctly: the reversal of energy gains its intensity from a horizontal renunciation as the active and ongoing devaluing of the world. The projection-and--reversal of this horizontal energy fuels one’s own atomizing energy upward thus cutting off a relational practice of the soul. Nietzsche regularly refers to this atomizing reactive flow as an active “reversal” — a turning back of the power of renunciation on oneself. This atomization becomes the personal relationship with God that is first a denial and renunciation of life in the world and second a self-renunciation of the vestiges of that life that reside within the self (e.g., anger, love, sex, gluttony, pride and all the other logismoi that are the stuff of living with others). Renunciation and anachoresis, therefore, are not simply emptying out of values to discover a real state of nothingness in the world. These spiritual practices of the soul actively place a value of nil on the world as a springboard and amplifier for atomizing practices of the soul.

What exactly is being reversed? Nietzsche and Deleuze are clear on this: the original anger and hatred of ressentiment is reversed. This reversal is the formation of bad conscience and a permanent state of guilt. Let me take, once again, the fable of the eagle and the lamb from the Genealogy (1.13). The imposition of “bad conscience” is something that the lamb coaxes out of the eagle. The lamb’s ressentiment toward the eagle must be internalized by the eagle as the belief that his actions are under his control and that the exercising of these actions is evil. This is the reversal of ressentiment from an outward projection of accusation to an inward absorption of this energy as a permanent state of guilt. Diagrammatically, it looks something like this, flowing from left to right:

The reversal is not something that simply happens within the eagle, however. This reversal of ressentiment into bad conscience also happens to the lamb. “But ressentiment is really only appeased when its contagion is spread… It cries, ‘It is my fault, it is my fault’ until the whole world takes up this dreary refrain, until everything active in life develops this same feeling of guilt (Nietzsche and Philosophy, 132).

Ressentiment, when it changes direction, changes how it is experienced: “It hides its hatred under a tempting love: I who accuse you, it is for your own good; I love you in order that you will join me, until you are joined with me, until you yourself become a painful, sick, reactive being, a good being” (128). Far from the diffusion of anger and hatred, bad conscience becomes its internalization. Thus ressentiment can live on in a sublimated form as Christian love, but this love is tied very closely to the cultivation of pain and suffering as the continuous and ongoing experience of nihilism. It is nihilism internalized as a type of subjectivity.

The trick with this type of subjectivity is that it can appear to be defusing anger and hatred, and thus appear to be undoing ressentiment, when in fact it is only covering it up and transforming it into an interiorized experience (128). This is how reactive forces triumph over active ones: at some point, anger and hatred turn back on both the accuser and the accused thus turning into something else — cultivated pain and suffering, guilt and bad conscience. The turning back is not just a diffusion of anger. It is also a fueling of bad conscience as the sublimation/transformation of ressentiment from its more active and projecting sublimation. The lamb’s active accusation eventually convinces the eagle that he is in control of his impulses and actions, that he is the doer who is accountable for his deeds. Thus bad conscience is not opposed to ressentiment, it is its fullest expression.

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With this reading of the verticalized, anachoretic practices of the soul established, I’m going to turn my attention now to two Christian thinkers whose practices of the soul complicate these practices: Evagrius Ponticus and Simone Weil. Both of these Christian mystics have much to teach us about undoing ressentiment and bad conscience as Nietzsche formulated it for us. In this way, I see Evagrius and Weil as returning to what Nietzsche saw in the difference between Jesus and Pauline Christianity. Jesus did not come to found a Church. He came to demonstrate a practice, specifically a practice that undoes ressentiment by disallowing both the outward projection of nihilism and the inward reversal that becomes a permanent state of guilt. To be sure, Evagrius and Weil are very, very different in this activation of spiritual practice. I will get to these differences later, but for the moment, I just want to mark that both are Christian mystics who return to an understanding of Christianity as a set of spiritual practices rather than doctrinal truths that demand professions of belief as the ticket to salvation. The differences will be seen in how they deal with renunciation.

Let’s start with Evagrius, one of the monks of the Egyptian desert, to understand how he uses the vertical practices of the soul to deal with anger and guilt. My choice of Evagrius is in some way an obvious one. He is widely considered to be the Desert Father who codified ascetic practices and mapped them onto human psychology that demanded an intensity of self-awareness that still resonates with those of us interested in spiritual practices. In other ways, he is not an easy choice. He doesn’t fit the Nietzschean criticism of Christianity after Christ. For Nietzsche, St. Paul codified Christianity into a set of doctrinal beliefs, which devalued the anti-ressentiment practices demonstrated by Jesus.

Evagrius seems to have lived two lives in the history of Christianity. In one life he was posthumously branded as a heretic. Growing up in and around Alexandria exposed him to the two centuries old neoplatonist-inspired teachings of Origen and Clement. His spiritual and intellectual debt to both of these Christian apologists is well understood. His concept of God as immaterial, transcendent and formless is “the One” of Plotinus. Salvation as the ability to reconnect with this estranged One through prayer and contemplation is central to neoplatonic Christian doctrine and practices. Once Origen was condemned for his heretical views, Evagrius wouldn’t be far behind.

His other life within the history of Christianity is far more powerful and long-lasting. The ascetic practices that he detailed in his two major practical works, The Praktikos and Chapters on Prayer, are still read today not as oddities in the annals of church history but for their continuing practical guidance. If you are interested in serious contemplation and not just modern “mindfulness” practices that will make you a better employee, you could do worse than deeply reading and understanding the Chapters on Prayer. If you want to understand how spiritual accomplishments can quickly lead to over-confidence (“vainglory”) and pride that undoes what one has gained, The Praktikos is an excellent guide. If you want to understand the virtues of confronting your demons directly rather than simply distracting yourself from them (and therefore not overcoming them authentically), Evagrius provides detailed help. Perhaps most importantly, if you want to understand contemplation as a “de-subjectivizing” practice — as the letting go of the ego — both works are indispensable. The loss of ego through a contemplative reconnection with God is both gnosis and salvation for Evagrius.

Evagrius’ two lives have been separated by church history as the doctrinal concerns about what is the truth of God, Jesus and the Holy Spirt have always been somewhat loosely connected to the Church’s spiritual practices. For Evagrius, the two were intimately connected and only artificially separated as orthodoxy and heresy became focused on the content of what a Christian is supposed to believe. We find a clue to the importance of this connection between doctrine and practice in the very first chapter of The Praktikos:

1. Christianity is the dogma of Christ our Savior. It is composed of praktike, of the contemplation of the physical world and of the contemplation of God.

To say that Christianity is a dogma that is composed of practices is to say something very different than what I grew up with. The praktike are what makes Christianity a way of life, and the dogma serves the practices. How does this work for Evagrius? I’ve already discussed his reliance on the neoplatonic concept of God as The One. In order for the de-subjectifying practices of contemplation to work, God has to be conceived of as immaterial, eternal and beyond the realm of normal human thought:

4. If Moses, when he attempted to draw near the burning bush, was prohibited until he should remove the shoes from his feet, how should you not free yourself of every thought that is colored by passion seeing that you wish to see One who is beyond every thought and perception? (Chapters on Prayer 4, emphasis added)

…

66. When you are praying do not fancy the Divinity like some image formed within yourself. Avoid also allowing your spirit to be impressed with the seal of some particular shape, but rather, free from all matter, draw near the immaterial Being and you will attain to understanding. (Chapters on Prayer 66, emphasis added)

Clearly the practical guidance is dependent on a conception of God as the One, as an “immaterial Being.” The doctrinal truths, in other words, serve the practices. There is almost certainly a debt to Gnosticism here. Evagrius’ portrayal of the knowledge of God is a spiritual knowledge that is beyond any kind of techne as know-how in the manipulation of discrete objects — e.g., medicine, ship building, making music, caring for livestock, et cetera.

For all this, it is still a relentlessly and exclusively verticalized practice of the soul: “Prayer is an ascent to the spirit of God” (Chapters on Prayer 35); [God] descends on the spirit itself and infuses his knowledge into it as he pleases” (ibid Chapter 61). In this vertical orientation, Evagrius’ practices and his neoplatonism-inspired cosmology are absolutely aligned. This verticalization places emphasis on the monk’s personal relationship with God at the expense of devaluing horizontal relationships. Those relationships tend to be one dimensional as the focus of gnosis is entirely directed back onto oneself and upward. It is an individualizing practice of the soul that eventually gives way, through contemplation, to a de-subjectification of the self.

De-subjectification is Evagrius’ ultimate objective for prayer and contemplation. This makes it difficult to shoehorn him into Nietzsche’s ascetic ideal. To be sure, a lot of the factors are there that Nietzsche describes. Ressentiment has definitely reversed direction such that the monk is definitely in a constant battle with sin and guilt. Evagrius is understood to be among the first to codify the demons as the eight different “evil thoughts” (logismoi) that continually assault the soul: impurity, gluttony, avarice, sadness, anger, acedia, vainglory, and pride. In other words, he codifies guilt and sin through the eight logismoi as part of the human condition. Further, accessing the truth as gnosis requires a great deal of acetic renunciation that starts with the physical anachoresis of social withdrawal so that the work can be exclusively within the monk’s interiority.

Yet, Evagrius is more sophisticated than that. I read his practices of prayer and contemplation as a return to what Nietzsche saw in Jesus — a spiritual practitioner who demonstrated a way of life that undoes ressentiment. Far from embracing ressentiment, Evagrius provides prolonged and detailed guidance on how to undo it through a profound and complete self-awareness. Yet this self-awareness is quite different than the subjectification we find in Nietzsche’s analysis of ressentiment. For Nietzsche, ressentiment is the relation of forces that end up creating an interiorized subject, complete with a bad conscience and perpetual guilt. The “man of ressentiment,” for Nietzsche, has an interiority that is filled up with memories he can’t release: “One cannot get rid of anything, one cannot get over anything, one cannot repel anything — everything hurts. Men and things obtrude too closely; experience strikes one too deeply; memory becomes a festering wound” (Ecce Homo 1.6 quoted in Deleuze, 116). This is what happens when anger turns to a desire for revenge that can’t act out its desires. The lamb is less powerful than the eagle and must resort to other measures. The result is the birth of a subject that is the doer of its deeds — the eagle comes to see itself as having intention and therefore can choose not to act. This is the birth of the responsible subject. It makes and keeps promises and holds itself responsible for doing so (Genealogy of Morals, 2.1). This subjectivity thus becomes a stability that spans a past, present and future with the same identity. Its memories are always at hand and ready to come back to consciousness as the power of forgetting is emaciated.

Evagrius occupies this ground, but he does so in order to undo the subjectifying effects of ressentiment. His ascetic practices end up de-subjectifying the self as the monk pursues an earth-bound salvation. (If there is any concept of an afterlife in his practical works, it certainly does not play an essential role in the effectivity of the practices.) While memory plays a key role in ressentiment for Nietzsche, it plays an equally important role for Evagrius. But the emphasis is different. For Nietzsche, the man of ressentiment holds onto his memories because they validate his sense of injustice. Evagrius sees these same memories as something to be let go of because they harbor feelings of anger and resentment:

22. The man who stores up injuries and resentment and yet fancies that he prays might as well draw water from a well and pour it into a cask that is full of holes. (Chapters on Prayer 22)

Memory is the problem — remembered injuries that the monk “stores up” and fosters as ongoing ressentiment. To pray is to let go of memories and keep them in check because they are activated by demons that want to distract the monk from prayer and contemplation:

44. When you pray keep your memory under close custody. Do not let it suggest your own fancies to you, but rather have it convey the awareness of your reaching out to God. Remember this — the memory has a powerful proclivity for causing detriment to the spirit at the time of prayer.

45. When you are at prayer the memory activates fantasies of either past happenings or of fresh concerns or else of persons you have previously injured.

46. The devil so passionatey envies the man who prays that he employs every device to frustrate that purpose. Thus he does not cease to stir up thoughts of various affairs by means of the memory. He stirs up the passions by means of the flesh. In this way he hopes to offer some obstacle to that excellent course pursued in prayer on the journey toward God. (Chapters on Prayer 44-46)

Memories are clearly the playground of demons. Far from holding onto them as does the man of ressentiment, Evagrius’ monk trains him/herself in prayer to let them go and thereby to undo the outward projection of ressentiment but also to prevent its doubling back on the self to become a permanent state of agitation. De-subjectification is essential to undoing the type of ressentiment.

In the English translation, directional metaphors abound in the ascetic works of Evagrius. Horizontal relationships are represented mostly by memories and other thoughts, and demons move from below (in Evagrius’ cosmology) to inhabit and energize these horizontal relationships as distractions from the vertical. Prayer and contemplation are always vertically oriented as the monk directs his/her attention upward and outward from the world. As a set of spiritual practices, Evagrius provides effective guidance on how to personally undo ressentiment through de-subjectification. Yet, we must not lose sight of the fact that these practices were developed as part of a strategy for cutting oneself off from social life. If we take this model as a template for the Christian soul, we don’t have a very robust understanding of how that soul gets along with others when it is out in the world:

41. When we are constrained to pass some time in the city or town then above all is the time to be abstemious. We find ourselves in the presence of secular persons and this measure will prevent the edge of our spirit from being dulled. We shall be able to avoid perpetrating some ill-considered action which being deprived of our customary practices we might be led to commit. Under the demons’ assaults such action might cause us to take flight from our monastic practices altogether. (Praktikos 41)

For a soul that has been cultivated through anachoresis, ascetics and renunciation, moving out into the world is a precarious situation. This soul, “deprived of its “customary practices,” is singularly ill equipped to interact with others productively. All it can do is steel itself so that it doesn’t do something it will regret later.

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Turning now to Simone Weil, I see crucial similarities with Evagrius, particularly how both emphasize de-subjectification as a spiritual practice. Weil’s concept of attention (l’attention) is well understood. It is an emptying of one’s predisposition and prejudices in order to truly hear and understand the affliction of another human being. As such, attention is a de-subjectification at the moment of encounter with affliction such that the afflicted other can be heard in his/her humanity without the listener — the attentive one — looking for the truth behind the expression.

Contrast this with a legal proceeding, which Weil was sharply critical of. A legal proceeding is a “hearing” that is listening for particular things — facts, intention, guilt, innocence, remorse, material damages, et cetera. The game is to figure out if the accused is guilty by trying to reduce everything to provable “facts” and whether or not the guilty act occurred “intentionally.” To effect a remedy, incarceration (in the case of criminal proceedings) or monetary restitution (in civil proceedings) become the only conceivable outcomes. Such practices prevent affliction from truly getting a hearing. The conceptual and practical scaffolding of the law only allow certain things to be heard because they require a limited way of listening and responding to affliction:

Nothing is more frightful than the spectacle, now so frequent, of an accused, whose situation provides him with nothing to fall back upon but his own words, and who is incapable of arranging these words because of his social origin and lack of culture, as he stands broken down by guilt, affliction and fear, stammering before judges who are not listening and who interrupt him in tones of ostentatious refinement. (Waiting for God, 105)

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Side note: One can find few better practical descriptions of Jean-Francois Lyotard’s notion of the differend — the pain and suffering that results directly from the inability of affliction to be expressed and heard in legal language games that have a monopoly on modern justice. To use Lyotard’s phrase, “bearing witness to the differend” is the practice of justice that requires something like Weil’s practice of l’attent. De-subjectification as a form of truly hearing the afflicted other is to “bear witness to the differend.”

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For all their shared practices of de-subjectification, Weil and Evagrius have very different practices of the soul. The fact that Weil can so easily engage in a sophisticated discussion of justice points to the crucial difference. For Weil, the soul is fundamentally relational, not vertical. Her spiritual practices enact the soul as primarily horizontally oriented. In other words, her soul starts as a relational soul rather than as an atomized and individualized soul that has to rebuild its horizontal relationships, if it cares at all to do so. Yet it is still a Christian soul. If this relational soul has a vertical orientation it is a downward flowing orientation and not an upward one. Crucially, it is not activated by pointing one’s attention upward to draw down the power of God — i.e., love. Rather, it can be activated when one confronts the affliction of another. This horizontal attention is the power one exercises that draws down the power of God.

As such, she is reversing the monkish energy of anachoresis and renunciation. Weil’s practices of the soul open out onto the world by pulling down the verticalized energy and flowing that energy outward toward others. This “pulling down” re-establishes the value of the horizontal and relational soul to connect with others:

The love of our neighbor is the love which comes down from God to man. It precedes that which rises from men to God. God is longing to come down to those in affliction. As soon as a soul is disposed to consent, though it were the last, the most miserable, the most deformed of souls, God will precipitate himself into it in order, through it, to look at and listen to the afflicted. Only as time passes does the soul become aware that he is there. But, though it finds no name for him, wherever the afflicted are loved for themselves alone, it is God who is present. (Waiting for God, 100; emphasis added)

The vertical soul here does not reach up and out of the world. It starts with the horizontal. This is an essential point. Weil is consciously reversing the upward movement. Twice in this passage (and again only a few paragraphs later) she refers to this power of love as coming down and precipitating into the soul. She is adamant that the horizontal movement must precede and initiate the vertical coming down. This is an important flow to understand because it is a reversal of the vertical orientation of the soul that, when understood as a practice, radically re-envisions the soul as relational. In fact, this relational notion of the soul requires the undoing of the vertical, which can actually hinder the horizontal relationship. If “the afflicted are merely regarded as an occasion for doing good,” then the one who is aiding the afflicted is not doing it for the sake of the other but for him/herself and his/her personal relationship with God. To truly engage one’s soul with an afflicted other is to recognize that the other is dehumanized by their affliction. The objective is to restore that humanity to the afflicted other, which cannot be done if your primary attention is vertically oriented — “See God, aren’t I doing great by helping this person in need?” “Almsgiving when it is not supernatural [i.e., activated by l’attention] is like a sort of purchase. It buys the sufferer” (98).

For Weil, this vertical disposition of the soul prevents one from seeing the afflicted other and “receive into itself the being that he is looking at, just as it is, in all his truth” (Waiting for God, 70). Crucially, this is an intuitive human capacity that does not require prior conceptual and dogmatic knowledge of God to be effective. “Implicit love,” or “the veiled form of love,” is the intuition that we all have before we come to any kind of definitive understanding of God’s love — before it finds a name for him:

The veiled form of love necessarily comes first however, and often reigns alone in the soul for a very long time. Perhaps, with a great many people, it may continue to do so until death. Veiled love can reach a very high degree of purity and power. (90)

Tapping into this intuition is l’attention and justice for Weil. Renunciation is central to her spiritual practice of the relational soul, but this renunciation is very different that the ascetic ideal that Nietzsche found so nihilistic and troubling. Weil’s practice of renunciation in the service of l’attention is fundamentally different than the ascetic version. If the renunciation of the monk was essentially tied to anachoresis as withdrawal from social relationships to focus on personal salvation, Weil reverses this to make renunciation the activation of the social and relational soul. L’attention to the afflicted other (and to nature) cannot happen without renunciation.

Let me unpack this a bit more. Activating this human intuition requires renunciation. This is a key practical term for Weil’s vision of the soul. In fact, l’attention cannot be understood without understanding the act of renunciation for Weil. The best way to understand this is to contrast it with Evagrius. For the latter, renunciation, anachoresis and devaluing social life all work together. They all work to energize the first outward movement of ressentiment so that it can be energized as a reversal back into the self and channeled upward into a personal relationship with God. As we’ve seen, Evagrius’ innovation and undoing of ressentiment involves going further to actually de-subjectify this reversal. Yet, we are still left with a template for a soul that is atomized, individualized, and struggles with authentically connecting with others when it is in the world. Thus verticalization insofar as it is a template for salvation remains deeply committed to negative and ascetic nihilism — the active devaluing of this world in order to find salvation within oneself as an individual act.

Weil’s renunciation is not nihilistic in the same way. In fact, she shows us a way out of negative and ascetic nihilism through renunciation. The first thing to point out is that Weil’s renunciation does not start by devaluing horizontal relationships. It does not start by actively placing a value of nil on the world. It starts as a renunciation of our own predispositions and prejudices so as to activate l’attention. As such, renunciation is an act of faith that we can empty ourselves and set aside our conceptual scaffoldings so that we can bear witness to the differend. This act of renunciation de-subjectifies the renouncer, not vertically, but horizontally:

The attention [that one pays to an afflicted other] is creative. But at the moment when it is engaged it is a renunciation. This is true, at least, if it is pure. The man accepts to be diminished by concentrating on an expenditure of energy, which will not extend his own power but will only give existence to a being other than himself, who will exist independently of him. Still more, to desire the existence of the other is to transport himself into him by sympathy, and, as a result, to have a share in the state of the inert matter which is his….

To wish for the existence of this free consent in another, deprived of it by affliction, is to transport oneself into him, it is to consent to affliction oneself, that is to say the destruction of oneself. It is to deny oneself. In denying oneself, one becomes capable under God of establishing someone else by a creative affirmation. One give oneself in ransom for the other. It is a redemptive act. (97, 98)

L’attention is creative renunciation of oneself in order to assist another in the activation of their humanity and their autonomy. We must dwell a bit on what exactly is being renounced when Weil says that creative renunciation “will not extend his own power but will only give existence to a being other than himself.” For Weil, God’s power is renunciation — the ability to know that you can do something but you choose not to do it for the benefit of the afflicted other: “On God’s part creation is not an act of self-expansion but of restraint and renunciation” (96).

Weil’s renunciation is not only the opposite of anachoretic atomization, it reverses it. One renounces one’s privileged position of power over the afflicted other in order to create the time and space for that person to gain back their humanity. This humanity is not a fundamental “sameness” that levels out all differences. This would be a disciplinary version of humanity that results from atomization. Such a disciplinary humanity would lead the one in power to see the afflicted other as a version of him/herself. Rather than sympathy, one offers judgment, advice, invectives, all of which amounts to the following admonition: “You should be more like me.” Despite his de-subjectifying practices, this is what love (agape) meant for Evagrius. All humans are measured by their difference from the monk, who is the template for human salvation: “A monk is a man who considers himself one with all men because he seems constantly to see himself in all men” (Chapters on Prayer 125: see also the immediately preceding chapters 122-124). To “see himself in all men” is to reduce everyone to an atomized sameness with the monk as the paradigm. We are all on the same individualized spiritual journey for our own salvation. The monk offers himself as a template for personal salvation, which is a way of seeing oneself in all individual human beings.

Weil’s concept of humanity is less of a concept (as a way of seeing the other) than it is a practice that renounces concepts and ways of seeing in order to help someone suffering from affliction. As such, Weil’s humanity is more in line with Lyotard’s notion of “the inhuman.” On the one hand, affliction is the sign of a lack of humanity — a dehumanization of the other brought about by a modern capitalist economy that treats all people as means to the end of wealth creation. But, on the other hand, this lack does not contain the seeds of its own fulfillment. We cannot and should not treat our own humanity as a template for others.

Horizontally oriented renunciation is therefore an overcoming of the atomizing power of ressentiment. It renounces the concepts and ways of seeing/hearing that force the other to speak his/her affliction in terms that would be understandable (and validating) to the one in power. This is the removal of the other’s autonomy at the expense of strengthening the one in power, and the apparatuses that keep him in power. Renunciation would be one-sided in this scenario. The other renounces his/her voice to speak in terms that reinforce power.

For Weil, renunciation must start from a recognition that one has power over the afflicted. This power automatically holds the other in contempt for his/her affliction. It is the responsibility of the one in power to renounce this automatic disposition to treat the other as human. But it goes further than that. It must be the de-subjectification of the one in power that allows him/her to bear witness to the differend:

At each moment we only exist because God consents to think us into being, although really we have no existence…. God alone has this power, the power really to think into being that which does not exist. Only God, present in us, can really think the human quality into the victims of affliction, can really look at them with a look differing from what we give to things, can listen to their voice, otherwise they would not have occasion to notice it.

Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him. (100)

This emptying out of oneself to listen to the other — to bear witness to the differend — requires de-subjecification of the one in power. This de-subjectification is an act of faith — the faith that the implicit love of God as the love of neighbor can be horizontally activated as renunciation of all the baggage we carry with us as we move through the world interacting with others. To empty oneself is not a nihilistic act of devaluing life. It is an affirming act that embraces passive nihilism of oneself — renunciation — that allows for a true hearing to occur, for the differend to be embraced and overcome. Ressentiment has no place here though it is a starting point that must be renounced and let go of so that the other can speak its affliction.

……….

End Note: Reading Weil’s practice of l’attention and renunciation through Nietzsche’s fable of the lamb and the eagle is tempting, instructive but dangerous. It would be easy to reduce her notion of renunciation to just another technique of the lamb to turn the eagle into a subject — the doer separated from its deeds and thus responsible for its violent actions against the lamb. But if all we do is focus on the lamb as the bad/evil actor in the fable — if we read back onto this fable a morality of good versus evil — we find ourselves forced to restore the eagle to is original state as an act of justice. This is not what Nietzsche’s philosophy was about. Justice cannot be founded on good versus evil. The overman is not a lion. The overman is a child. Zarathustra must become a child. We must not restore the eagle to its original state as a pure actor of instinct. This is not a just outcome of this fable. We must push through the fable to the de-subjectification of the subject. We must become children again in order to bear witness to the differend. We cannot return to the noble morality of the eagle thus leaving the lamb in a submissive state. Eagles need lambs as their lesser others. Rather, we mush push through subjectification to see in it the condition of possibility for de-subjectification. This is our moral inheritance and the challenge Nietzsche issued to us beyond good and evil.

Weil reminds us of this, that to characterize people and actions as good or evil is a choice we make and that we need not make:

A man may be indwelt by God, by the power of evil or by the mechanism of the flesh. When he gives or punishes, what he bears within him enters the soul of the other through the bread or the sword. The substance of the bread or the sword are virgin, empty of good and of evil, equally capable of conveying one or the other. He who is forced by affliction to receive bread or to suffer chastisement has his soul exposed naked and defenseless both to evil and to good. (106, emphasis added)