Interpreting Weil (Or: Trying, Usually in Vain, to Understand)

A friend recently wrote to me after reading Simone Weil and inquired what one is to make of the following passage:

"To have been at the side of Christ and in the same state during the crucifixion seems to me a far more enviable privelege than to be at the right hand of his glory."

I thought I might as well place my attempt to make sense of this quote on the blog.

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First, as another friend recently pointed out to me, Simone Weil does seem to have somewhat of a "fetish" for suffering. I think this is correct: we should, in all likelihood, be quite careful when reading and interpreting what Weil has to say about suffering. The fact that she died of complications related to a self-imposed starvation indicates, perhaps, some degree of psychosis. I say "perhaps" because I want to state clearly that in this domain, particularly within the Christian tradition, the line between psychotic masochism and selfless love is quite narrow. Think of Christ: if we did not see him as exceptionally holy, indeed as divine, then we should say that his crucifixion is the utmost example of masochism. The failure to distinguish between self-sacrificial love [or holiness] and masochism has lead ordinary Christians into all sorts of miserable situations. [Think of the spouse who stays with an abusive partner out of "self-sacrificial" love.]

Nevertheless, I think we can sidebar certain questions about Weil's personal connection to suffering here, and deal directly with her motivation for this perplexing statement.

For Weil, it would seem that Christ demonstrates God's self-imposed weakness. God must make himself weak in order to provide space for our freedom. In fact, Weil seems to entangle the moment of "creation" with the crucifixion itself: The moment of Christ's death is the moment at which God separates himself from himself - he withdraws himself from the universe in order to make room for us. Thus, God's weakness paradoxically becomes a sign of his great love for us. To be with Christ at the moment of his crucifixion is to be in some way in the primeval act from which our very being derives. God makes himself absent in order that we might exist as beings separate from him.

And yet, even more paradoxically, this separation is the only gift we are capable of returning to God. That is to say, the only thing that we can surrender to God is ourselves - our autonomy. If we are in the same state as Christ, we are emulating his act. We withdraw ourselves from our own autonomy, making ourselves empty. Yet this emptiness is simultaneously a participation in the divine act of selfless love, the very act which created and sustains the universe.

As for why this is better than being in paradise, I do not know. Perhaps it is our participation in the divine act that makes the crucifixion more enviable than to stand with God after the fact.

In any case, this is what I gleam from Weil, but I honestly don't have a good idea. Furthermore, I have simply cannot imagine that Weil means any of this to be taken literally (i.e. to take the crucifixion-creation as a sort of historical event that intersects with the eternal). Finally, even if she means it as some sort of existential story about the meaning and motivation of selfless love, I don't know exactly what I myself should make of it (i.e. what does this story mean to me? what would it mean to believe it?).