“Thy Will Be Done, on Earth as It Is in Heaven”

At the end of my last meditation, which was on Simone Weil’s reading of the line “forgive us our debts as we also forgive our debtors” from the Our Father, I ran up against the problem of renunciation and nihilism. Put simply, and as a question, does the renunciation of oneself as a stable ego that puts itself at the center of its own history require resignation of agency? Weil’s answer is clearly no, but insofar as I am undertaking my own meditation on her meditation, I must come to terms with this for myself. To this end, I want to back-track a bit in her reading to focus on the earlier lines, “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

Her meditation splits these lines in two. “Thy will be done” focuses on how one aligns one’s desire with a belief in God as the orchestrator of a providential universe. In this section, we have clear connections with the Stoic doctrine of providence. It would be pretty easy to show that she is drawing on this doctrine and making use of it as Seneca and other Stoics did, albeit in a Christian context. To believe that the events of the universe are inherently good is part of a spiritual practice that allows one to break free of a notion of the self that holds the world in contempt because things have not worked out as we wanted them to. To believe that the universe (and the other people in it) owes us something because we have done all the right things is to invite ressentiment as the fuel for our identities. When things go well, ressentiment lies dormant because the universe is doing right by us. When things go ill, ressentiment is ready to flare up because we firmly believe that we don’t deserve our ill treatment.

For Weil, as for Seneca, seeing the universe as providential is emphatically to undo our desire to make a claim on it, as if the universe owes us something and must answer to us for its sins. Rather, the claim flows in the other direction: the providential universe makes a claim on us. To satisfy this claim, we must actively align our will and our desires with how things actually have happened:

We have here quite a different thing from resignation. Even the word acceptance is too weak. We have to desire that everything that has happened should have happened, and nothing else. We have to do so, not because what has happened is good in our eyes, but because God has permitted it, and because the obedience of the course of events to God is in itself an absolute good. (Waiting for God 159)

This is a very tricky passage. From a lesser intellect, I’d be left scratching my head. Does she really mean that everything that happens is for the good? Is she really just channeling Voltaire’s Pangloss that we live in the best of all possible worlds? No, that’s not what is happening. She is smarter than that, and I owe her the benefit of that doubt. She is addressing in this meditation the larger problem of how we issue claims and debts in such a way that “We live on the expectation of these compensations.” These claims put ourselves at the center of the universe and therefore the reference point for judging history by how it treats us. This centering of the self amidst the events of history is the very definition of Nietzsche’s man of ressentiment. We see everything in relation to ourselves at the centerpoint of the universe. Ressentiment is the energy that affirms one’s self and one’s suffering by giving it a meaning — a meaning that reverberates back onto the man of ressentiment. Ressentiment “gives births to values” (GM1.10) by putting the self at the center of the universe and judging it harshly if it doesn’t do right by us.

But we Nietzscheans know where this goes. The ressentiment directed outward at the universe doubles back, through the power of the ascetic priest, to become a permanent state of guilt and “bad conscience.” We’re stuck in a yo-yo’ing between outward projecting ressentiment and its inward absorption. To put a point on it, Nietzsche, like Weil, relies on the metaphor of debt:

… the aim now is to turn back the concepts “guilt” and “duty” — back against whom? There can be no doubt: against the “debtor” first of all, in whom from now on the bad conscience is firmly rooted, eating into him and spreading within like a polyp, until at last the irredeemable debt gives rise to irredeemable penance, the idea that it cannot be discharged (“eternal punishment”). Finally, however, they are turned back against the “creditor,” too: whether we think the causa prima of man, the beginning of the human race, its primal ancestor who is from now on burdened with a curse (“Adam,” “original sin,” “unfreedom of the will”), or of nature from whose womb mankind arose and into whom the principle of evil is projected from now on (“the diabolizing of nature”), or of existence in general, which is now considered worthless as such (nihilistic withdrawal from it, a desire for nothingness or a desire for its antithesis, for a different mode of being, Buddhism and the like)… (GM 2.21).

All this starts from ressentiment arising from a claim on history to do right by mankind who has learned to see history and the actors within it as his debtors — He has issued credits that history must repay. As this ressentiment realizes its futility — that the debt is irredeemable — ressentiment is turned inward “back against the ‘creditor’” thus giving birth to a concept of mankind “from now on burdened with a curse.” We are forever riding on the yo-yo (Freud’s forte-da?) of outward-projecting ressentiment and inward-turning guilt. From the creditor’s perspective, she has issued a credit that she should have know could not be repaid. From the debtor’s perspective, he took on too much of a burden . It is all of a piece that starts when the man of ressentiment places himself at the center of history and holds everything and everyone accountable to his well being. “We think we have claims everywhere” and “We live on the expectations of these compensations” (Waiting for God 162, 163). “The man of ressentiment experiences every being and object as an offense in exact proportion to its effect on him” (Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 116).

To see the world as providential in this light is not to make an ontological assertion that stands on its own as a truth claim. Again, we are not to play the naive Pangloss. It is to undertake a spiritual practice that seeks to break the yo-yo’s string without violently shattering the yo-yo itself. Weil realizes the potential problem in seeing the universe as providential — that we give in to acceptance as resignation (i.e., passive nihilism, acedia). If the universe is providentially organized, yet bad stuff happens to us, why try at all? Isn’t it safer to release your desires and sit on the couch hoping that nothing whatsoever happens to you, good or bad? Why not remain unengaged and neutral while binge watching Netflix? Acceptance as resignation vacates our will to desire. It devolves into Nietzsche’s “will to nothingness” (GM 3.28). Passive nihilism manifests as anachoresis (monkish withdrawal) as an end in itself. The universe is going to do what it’s going to do; why get involved?

Read in the broader context of her meditation on the Our Father, we must see her reading of “Thy will be done” as an attempt to reactivate and reclaim desire (“We have to desire…”) from a belief that the universe owes us something. Let me try to make this as simple as I can for myself. There are moments when I look back at the past through a lens of self-denigration: I should have made this move in my career, or I should not have given up on something so soon, or I should have leaned in harder on something I felt was going the wrong way. Viewing the past through the lens of self-denigration easily becomes activation of ressentiment. This lens holds onto the denigration as the kind of memory that Nietzsche warned against — the man of ressentiment “cannot have done with anything” because he holds grudges, which is an unhealthy form of memory. Weil echoes this sentiment when she says, “We think we have claims everywhere” (Waiting for God 162). Unrequited imaginary claims, unremitted imaginary debts, self-denigration, and ressentiment are all expressions of energy that doubles back on ourselves to become self-poisoning. This energy feels like a clinging to the past as one clings to a sense of being wronged. Something owed to us has not been repaid, and we fill up that lack with self-poisoning amalgamation of frustration, anger, guilt, and victimhood.

This debt can be a claim we make on the external world, or it can be a claim we make on ourselves and our shortcomings. “If only I wasn’t so passive, I would have been successful.” This kind of self-denigration rises to a grudge that we hold against ourselves (i.e., Nietzsche’s concepts of guilt and bad conscience). It enforces a continuity of the past with the present that feels like a holding on, not a letting go. To say it again, it lives in our souls as a tense feeling of grasping or tightening. We don’t let it go because it is also a feeling of self-validation. To be angry at myself or another for a perceived injustice is to affirm my existence; it is to say to myself and others that I matter because I am, or should be, angry.

Here is the upshot of all this: to see the universe as providential is to reverse the direction of the claim. To say “Thy will be done” is to truly desire (and not just passively accept) that what has happened is perfectly fine. I must take this reversal seriously because it is the heart of the meditation, I think. This is where we must now turn to the second phrase: “on earth as it is in heaven.” Rather than holding the world accountable to ourselves, we must see ourselves as accountable to the world. This means, first, accepting how things have actually happened and, second, not letting that acceptance become either passive nihilism (resignation) or negative nihilism (permanent hatred, disparagement, and disgust). Seen in this way, providence can only mean a disposition that accepts the past with a commitment to not letting that acceptance become nihilistic. Thus the “good” that is assumed to exist in “providence” is the commitment we make to stave off nihilism. In fact, to achieve this non-nihilistic disposition does not require us to interpret “good” to mean either benign or beneficial. For a Stoic like Seneca, providential goodness only means that the universe has given you an opportunity to rise to the occasion — it has issued a test of your ability to respond virtuously. For it to become beneficial, you have to rise to the occasion. Thus, the Stoic version of providence (which Weil is Christianizing), makes a claim on you that you cannot help but respond to. You cannot choose not to respond. That is Stoic providence. You don’t sit outside of events and decide whether or not you want to act. You have to act because you are already in it. Our actions are always responses to some other actions. Even if you choose not to act, you have chosen the act of not acting.

This cannot mean forgetting the past in the conventional sense of ignoring it or being unable to recall its events. It requires embracing the past as the basis of our reality, but without the disposition that puts ourselves in the center as the ones who issue the claim and who demand that the credits we’ve issued be repaid. The trick is not to release the debts and thus to remain in a position of a benevolent creditor, but a creditor nonetheless. The trick is to release ourselves from the creditor-debtor binary that fuels ressentiment. But, and this must remain clear, this release does not absolve us from the claims made upon us by history. To release ourselves from these claims would license us to ignore injustices, which would be so inconsistent a reading of Weil’s intentions as to be disingenuous.

Let me take a long and difficult passage from her reading of “on earth as it is in heaven” and try to unpack all of this:

Since our failures of the past have come about, we have to desire that they should have come about. We have to extend this desire into the future, for the day when it will have become the past. It is a necessary correction of the petition that the Kingdom of God should come. We have to cast aside all other desires for the sake of our desire for eternal life, but we should desire eternal life itself with renunciation. 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 when 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 despite God’s will, if such a thing were conceivable. (159, emphasis added)

I’ll start with the italicized phrases because I think that is the heart of the matter. What does it mean to “desire eternal life with renunciation”? This, I believe, is central to how Weil reclaims Christianity from a doctrinal belief that ensures an eternal life of the soul after death just by asking for it. Her point throughout her work had always been channeling “the implicit love of God” through ourselves into our actions and behaviors with others in the world. Hers is a relational soul. It is not an atomized possession whose ownership is transferred to God through one-and-done rituals like Catholic baptism or an evangelical’s acceptance of Jesus Christ as your personal savior.

Put simply, Weil asks us to struggle against our desire to seek end points. Salvation is one of those end points against which we must struggle, yet we must seek it. To seek salvation as an end point would be to activate an indifference to the world: “our desire for eternal life” would be a desire to escape from this world to find fulfillment in another. That is emphatically not what she is meditating on or advocating. Such a desire would seek the “Kingdom of God” as an end point — either apocalyptic here on earth or an eternal reward after death in heaven.

To make this clear, we have to understand what she means when she says, “We must not even become attached to detachment.” To desire a connection with eternity as a permanent state of being is itself a problem. She emphasizes this in the next sentence: “‘Attachment to salvation is even more dangerous than the others.” What does it mean to be attached to salvation and to not become attached to detachment? She means that we must reach for the “transcendent energy” of God (161) but this reaching cannot itself become the desire for an end point as if we could permanently and irrevocably possess this energy. She is thus using attachment in the Buddhist sense where desire sees the desired as an object that we can own. We cannot desire transcendence as a permanent state of escape from a fallen world and a fallen self. This would be to put ourselves at the center of things as atomized souls issuing the claims and debts on our own behalf that she has been trying to undo in this meditation.

Why is this attachment to salvation “more dangerous than the others”? It is the danger of dangers because it exonerates us from entering back into the world to make it a better place. We have to remember that to see the universe as providential is not to license our anachoresis from it; it is part of a spiritual practice that plugs ourselves back into the world as owners of our actions. She makes this clear in so many places in her meditation, but perhaps no clearer than in her final lines:

It is impossible to say [the Our Father] once through, giving the fullest possible attention to each word, without a change, infinitesimal perhaps but real, taking place in the soul. (166)

The point of the prayer is not permanent withdrawal but transformation of the soul as the agent of our actions in the world. In other words, to seek salvation as a permanent state of being that is purely verticalized in a relationship with God is to remove ourselves from the world. This removal is a disposition of ressentiment that projects nihilism outward — placing a value of nil on the world — so as to channel our energy upward and away from the world. We atomize our souls as our own possessions cordoned off from any desire to act on behalf of others.

For Weil, the saying of the Our Father is not an act of atomization. It is an act of daily renewal that seeks contact with the transcendent energy of God so as to bring it back into the world as the transformation of desire as is made clear in the final lines I cited just above. But two additional passages will suffice to make this point very clear:

After having, in our first petition, torn our desire away from time in order to fix it upon eternity, thereby transforming it, we return to this desire which has itself become in some measure eternal, in order to apply it once more to time. Whereupon our desire pierces through time to find eternity behind it. (158, emphasis added)

There is a transcendent energy whose source is in heaven, and this flows into us as soon as we wish for it. It is a real energy; it performs actions through the agency of our souls and of our bodies. (161, emphasis added)

It should be crystal clear that this energy is only a real energy insofar as it returns to the world as a transformation of the agency of our embodied souls. This is a reversal of knee-jerk Platonism that would see the transcendent as “the real” and the world we live in as a lesser entity. (It is also a completely wrong reading of Plato, especially Books 6 and 7 of The Republic where this return from eternity is explicitly called for.) For Weil, transcendent reality can only be realized by being channeled back into the world (“apply it once more to time”) through the embodied soul’s agency. Her metaphors of tearing away and piercing through time serve not as end states but as meditational acts that are daily renewals of that transcendent energy within our souls. To use a concept from Levinas, this “transcendent energy” is activated through imagining God, as Descartes did, through the “idea of Infinity.” This idea is a mental technique that prevents our seeing this transcendent energy as an end point, as an attachment. The moment that we feel ourselves attempting to hold onto it as a permanent possession — as Salvation — we engage this idea of Infinity to cut off the desire to possess. We cannot claim it for ourselves, but can only engage with it momentarily. But for all that, it is an energy that can only be realized by being channeled through our souls back into the world as a genuine love of the other that takes the other on his/her own terms without prejudgment and without seeing the other as a version of ourselves.

Thus it is crucial to see that transcendent energy as eternal, but it cannot become a permanent possession or a desire for permanent anachoresis. We have to see our ability to connect with it as fleeting and in need of regular renewal. This is what she means when she speaks of “the necessary correction of the petition that the Kingdom of God should come.” What is being corrected? Specifically our desire for a permanent coming of the Kingdom of God, which she has earlier defined as “the complete filling of the entire soul of intelligent creatures with the Holy Spirit” (157). This “complete filling” is never complete in the sense of crossing a threshold with no return. This kind of completeness is the metaphor that must be corrected. While the soul can be completely full of the Holy Spirit, the fullness will pass. But if the fullness only leaves us with a desire for anachoresis as attachment to detachment, we have not recognized the claim this energy makes on us.

How do we correct it? We do so by not letting salvation become a desire for a permanent state of being. It should not become an attachment to detachment, but a daily renewal and commitment to action in the world. This is what she means when she uses the water metaphor at the end of the long passage I cited. It is a difficult read because it is advocating, on the face of it, wanting our loved ones to be deprived of God’s love. But that is a short-sighted reading that is not at all consistent with what has come before or what will come after. She is just stating in different terms that the thirst for eternal life should not become a desire to never be thirsty again. It is a desire for thirst to be renewed regularly as a motivation to drink but not drown — that water should never be so abundant that we don’t ever get thirsty and that we never experience a desire for water again. (This is better understood through her meditation on “give us this day our daily bread,” which I will take up in the next meditation.)

I can now turn to the first part of the passage to better understand what she means by “Since our failures of the past have come about, we have to desire that they should have come about. We have to extend this desire into the future, for the day when it will have become the past.” To see the universe as providential is not to deny our shortcomings. We have had past failures. It is the disposition to those failures that we must correct. When she says, “we have to desire that they should have come about,” she is exhorting us to transform our disposition to history: we must see our past actions as something we may not have been in control of then but we can become in control of now and in the future.

Put succinctly: we must desire a daily renewal and transformation of desire, and this desire must extend into the future when the future becomes the past. Our disposition to the past via the belief in providence is to detach ourselves from the past so that we can reattach in a new way with transformed desires that are daily renewed by the “transcendent energy” that is “the implicit love of God.” Rather than seeing the past as the formation of a debt owed to us, and thus to hold the future accountable to repayment, we detach ourselves from this disposition of debt so that we can stop putting ourselves and our atomized souls at the center of salvation. Again, we cannot just hold onto our identities as creditors who have merely forgiven debts. This doesn’t go far enough in the transformation required of us as agents in the world.

This is not to say that there is no injustice or that we should ignore injustices because everything happened according to God’s will. This would be to embrace acceptance as resignation that she argues against in this meditation. Quite the opposite. To detach ourselves from a disposition of debts owed to us is to stop seeking permanent states of being as salvation — for ourselves or for mankind in general. These desires for permanent states are themselves conducive of injustice. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have made this abundantly clear. The challenge is, again, not to ignore (with some sort of Panglossian worldview) the fact that injustice occurs and that we live in the best of all possible worlds. The challenge is to detach injustice from grand narratives of human progress that would see the future as the fulfillment of debts incurred in the past. When we think we know what future repayment should look like, that is when violence begins. Debtors will be sorted from creditors in an imagined but very real Day of Judgment. Prior to that, we shall have trails of tears, death camps, gulags, Holocausts and other similar installment payments against the grand debt of history.

The disposition that results from this meditation on the Our Father blends fear, confidence and humility in a way that re-imagines and re-energizes personal agency while releasing the creditor-debtor worldview. This is intimately bound up with the line “Give us this day our daily bread.” I will need to more fully take up in my next meditation this connection between the daily bread of spiritual renewal and the trinity of fear-confidence-humility.