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Deborah Casewell: She does think that beauty is one of these links with the supernatural, with God. And so the experience of beauty becomes a way in which God is able to move you from yourself and kind of be there as well. And she thinks that people need beautiful things. I mean, they need experiences of beauty in order to exist in the world, or in some ways beauty helps us exist in the world, if this world is ruled by force and necessity.

These flashes of beauty and these flashes of compassion break into the world in which we live in, and take us out, out of that kind of situation of force. Only the madness of love can be the kind of love that actually exists. Helps people in the world, fundamentally, that people, even though they know it's mad and they find it mad and they sometimes rather not see it, they need that kind of love and they need people who love in that kind of way.

The way in which she is and the way in which she sees Christ being is indispensable. Even though the path that you have to go down has nothing to recommend, as she says, in the eyes of the reasonable world, nothing to recommend it. But it's the only just thing to do. It's the only just and loving thing to do in the end.

For her, God is the Ultimate reality, but also God is love. And so the goal of human existence, I think, is to return to God and consent to God. That's the goal of human life. 

Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I’m Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture.

All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Those are the opening lines of Simone Weil's famous work, Gravity and Grace. She wrote notebooks and letters throughout her life, of course, reading and teaching anyone who'd listen as well.

She's thought to have carried a copy of Plato's Symposium around, hoping to teach fellow laborers of the grape harvest in the south of France, for instance.

Grace fills empty spaces. But it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. These aphoristic lines were edited together from notebooks she passed to a French writer in 1942, prior to her death. So when you read Gravity and Grace, you may well be reading her work in progress, ideas that Faye herself was still struggling through, still working out.

And they're beautiful. We like poetry. And a personal side note, it was poet Christian Wyman's presentation of Weil that really made me notice her work. Here he is from a past interview, about a hundred episodes ago, where he commented on her suggestion that, quote, we must take the feeling of being at home into exile.

We must be rooted in the absence of a place. 

Christian Wiman: The notion of humanity, human existence, being in exile, fundamentally, I mean, that's an notion, obviously, but it's a secular notion in modern times. And the notion that you, in some way, you create your own home out of what you know of home or what you remember of home.

We must be rooted in the absence of a place. So what is it that roots you? Well, for her, she wrote a book called The Need for Roots. It's, it's, it's tradition. It's language. It's, It's a religion, but it's not a place. It's not a homeland. She was out of hers, and so many people, when she was writing, were driven out of their homelands.

And so that's a particularly modern notion. I think all poets, though, experience the feeling of displacement that comes with perception. You know, life is the thing. Words are always a kind of displacement.

Evan Rosa: Whether exile, affliction, self emptying, uprooting, there's an intensity to Weil's words that pierce through the facades of comfort, ease, entertainment, and happy self obsession. Again, all of these following passages are from Gravity and Grace. Decreation,

to make something created pass into the uncreated. Destruction, to make something created pass into nothingness. A blameworthy substitute for decreation. Creation is an act of love, and it is perpetual. Everything which is grasped by our natural faculties is hypothetical. It is only supernatural love that establishes anything.

Thus, we are co creators. We participate in the creation of the world by de creating ourselves. We only possess what we create. What we renounce, what we do not renounce, escapes from us. We are born and live in an inverted fashion, for we are born and live in sin, which is an inversion of the hierarchy. We have to be nothing in order to be in our right place in the whole.

It is necessary to uproot oneself. By uprooting oneself, one seeks greater reality. It is necessary to uproot oneself, to cut down the tree and make of it a cross, and then to carry it every day. I have to imitate God, who infinitely loves finite things. In that they are finite things. To know that what is most precious is not rooted in existence, that is beautiful.

Why? It projects the soul beyond time. She and her writing are a beautiful enigma. It's hard to make sense of her, but there's the hope for reward. This episode is our third installment of a short series exploring how to read Simone Weil. Besides Gravity and Grace, she's the author of The Need for Roots, and Waiting for God, and much more.

All with a posthumous influence. that has far reaching impact in literature, philosophy, theology, poetry, and political activism. In this series, we're exploring Simone Faye the mystic, the activist, and the existentialist. And what we'll see is that so much of her spiritual, political, and philosophical life are deeply unified in her way of being and living and dying.

First, we heard from Eric Springstead, one of the founders of the American Weil Society and author of Simone Faye for the 21st Century, discussing her spirituality, views on prayer and attention, and her mystical experience. Then we looked at her activist side, asking her foundational question, what are you going through?

English professor Cynthia Wallace joined me to discuss her book, The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil, Feminism, Justice, and the Challenge of Religion. This week, we're exploring Simone Weil, the existentialist, with philosopher Deborah Casewell, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chester, author of Monotheism and Existentialism, and co director of the Simone Weil Research Network in the UK.

Together in this conversation, we discuss how her life of extreme self sacrifice importantly comes before her philosophy. How to understand her central but often confusing concepts of decreation and God's abdication of the world. Her approach to beauty as the essential human response for finding meaning in a world of force and necessity.

The madness of Christ as the only way to engage and struggle for justice. And how she connects that to the Greek tragedy of Antigone, which is the continuation of the Oedipus story, and the connection between love, justice, and living a life of madness. Thanks for listening today.

Deborah, thank you so much for joining me on For the Life of the World. 

Deborah Casewell: Thank you very much for having me. 

Evan Rosa: I'm excited to talk about Simone Weil with you, your interest in her. I'm fascinated specifically about where she stands. as perhaps an existentialist thinker, um, but more than an existentialist thinker, very much a doer and a person whose life and whose being in the world is equally interesting with her thoughts.

And I wanted to start with the biographical points that stand out most to you. What elements of her biography are interesting and make her so particular? 

Deborah Casewell: When people talk about Simone Bey's life, you always kind of get the greatest hits of mad things that she did. That's usually how she's framed. And it's, it'd be challenging for me to say that I'm not also interested because of that either.

So you have her kind of, you know, running off to join and go and fight in Spain, stepping into a pot of boiling oil and having to go and recover in Portugal where she has her first mystical experience, that kind of thing. The time that she took off from her teaching job on a sabbatical to go and work in factories and the work that she produced from that, those kind of things that I find particularly interesting and striking as well.

And especially in terms of kind of, you know, relationships to the existentialists, there's always a very, very famous. And I think that's the kind of thing that's really interesting about this story of her meeting with Simone de Beauvoir, which de Beauvoir relates in Memoirs of a Beautiful Daughter, where she always has this great admiration for Simone Weil, and then Simone Weil's, you know, kind of around the universities and she's, I don't know, advocating for, you know, sending money or food to people, starving people.

And Simone de Beauvoir's like, shouldn't we also care for people's minds, not just their bodies? And, you know, Simone looks her up and down and says, you've never been hungry, have you? Which felt like it's very unsaid. Well, fair to go, but it's a kind of a, in that, in that story, and also the story where she managed to like get Trotsky to stay at her parents house and they ended up shouting, like, you know, for hours, hours during the night, quite violently.

So I think he shouted quite violently at her. Wow. You get a sense of her personality, because there's always these stories of her kind of, you know, self sacrifice, her starving, starving to death, her kind of giving things up. But you also get in these stories a sense in which she's quite a firebrand, actually, that she's got a personality.

And I think it's that combination of personality and kind of, you know, drastic act that draws people to Simone Weil. And it kind of draws me to her as well, that you're kind of not dealing with somebody who is, you know, Always going to do things you expect or be the kind of person that you expect. And you find that in her writings as well.

Evan Rosa: I think you're right that it, the greatest hits and the sort of amazing things. And it, it's, we're not just guilty of this with respect to Weil, right? Like we're always heroizing figures when we want to make heroes and just in general. And What about us? Like, what does that say about us that we're looking for something in Weil?

I'm just curious what you think about that. 

Deborah Casewell: It's something that I worry about sometimes that people get interested in her for the stories and not necessarily for what she writes. And so you get a kind of, as you say, a kind of odd idolization of her or a sense in which you can't then interact so critically or systematically with all her philosophy.

Because her figure stands in the way so much and the kind of the respect that people have. I mean, I think it's, I think you should have respect for the kind of things that she did, not always uncritically, but you should. But I think that sometimes gets in the way of having conversations about Simone Weil or it attracts certain people to Simone Weil who then go one way or the other.

So I found this in some of the early biographies of Simone Weil. They were kind of like, oh, she's such a saint. Oh, she's such a wonderful person. And that aspect of her was emphasized. And then you get other biographies, which then emphasize the more troubling aspects of her biography. The intense kind of almost anti Semitism she had, despite being Jewish, and the relationship to food as well.

There's an entire biography where someone talks to Freud's granddaughter or daughter about whether she's anorexic or not. 

Evan Rosa: What are your thoughts about her relationship, say, to food? Because this was, I mean, this was central. I mean, it was like sort of central biographical point about her experience of food and hunger and a sort of, I mean, what looks like a sort of choice out of solidarity to be hungry.

Do you feel comfortable going there? 

Deborah Casewell: It's not something that I think that I know as much about as other people might, because it's not why I find her interesting, but I can say a couple of things. I think for some people, she can be an unhealthy role model. And Aspects of the food, the relationship with food are part of that, that it's a kind of an aspirational relationship to eating, to food.

So I'm actually, I think there is some concern there. 

Evan Rosa: Would you give us a little bit of the details around like the particular aesthetic practices that she was experimenting with or committed to with respect to food?

Deborah Casewell: She was, I don't know whether she was committed to them, but she had habits around food.

She would only want to eat things that were unblemished and perfect. So she'd reject food. She'd reject apples, for example, if they had like small spots on them, everything had to be perfect. And so when she was at, when she was dying in Kent. She did ask for food, but she asked for food that was impossible to get in a English hospital during the war.

So she wanted like, sort of, she wanted pommes purée, like extremely, like extremely luxurious, butter filled, creamy mashed potatoes, which you're not going to get in 1933 in Kent. But that, and so, but any food that wasn't that she would reject. 

Evan Rosa: Interesting. So there's both like the, this kind of, I mean, not to psychoanalyze her, but, but there's also the other way, which is sort of like hunger strike level.

Deborah Casewell: Yeah. I think her mother also kind of had to run around after her and basically feed her and make sure that she was eating and, you know, buy food for her that could be cooked for her. And because again, these quite stringent demands around food, but I've also heard some people say that one of the reasons that she might have that was because her mother was kind of an germophobe.

And wouldn't want, they couldn't touch anything if they'd washed their hands, that kind of aspect as well. In terms of the hunger strike, for me, I think, because I know that her relationship with food is tied up with the idea of perfect food, and that's kind of, you know, desire for the impossible, even in the food.

The hunger strike aspect of it, the whole, you know, starving in solidarity with the prisoners of war, I think that's part of it, but it's, but there were other aspects of it as well. The very famous story that gets told about her and her brother is that they gave up sugar in solidarity with soldiers in World War I, but I also read somewhere that apparently that wasn't quite as, they could go out and get some money for doing so as well, so it was.

More complicated, I think, than a kind of an early expression of solidarity with the unfortunate. 

Evan Rosa: To, to continue on with biography, one thing you told me is that calling her philosophy a way of life is problematic because her life seems to come before her philosophy. And I would love to hear what you mean by that and how you see it in Bey.

Deborah Casewell: Yeah, I think that if you look at the way she talks about things like reading, she talks about attention, she talks about the practice of prayer, I think these are definitely things that you can abstract from her to create kind of philosophy of life where you develop yourself ethically and morally through these practices of attention to become somebody who is open ethically.

I think you could absolutely do that. But then you look at her life and her life is one of this extreme, mad self sacrifice as well. And that's partly why I think I was interested in talking about are we struggling for justice because she talks so much in that text about how real justice, real love is completely mad.

And so I think for me it's that relation that that kind of, you know, tension between actually some quite down to earth practical ways to think about prayer, to think about attention, to think about ethical practice, to link ethics with your, the way in which you relate to objects, you relate to learning, you relate to reading, writing, translation, and then that kind of madness as well, the way in which that's realized for her in madness and in some way only approved of.

If it's mad as well rather than kind of moderate or sensible or reasonable 

Evan Rosa: when you say mad is that What does that mean? Radical? 

Deborah Casewell: No, I think she just means it would, it would look completely insane to the outside, to the reasonable world, it would look completely insane. 

Evan Rosa: Bewildering and just completely other kind of thing.

And 

Deborah Casewell: alienating as well. People would react with hostility to it and turn away from it because it would just seem so mad. 

Evan Rosa: Yeah, let's talk a little bit about like the philosophical principles that kind of ground this. And I think we've, you've already been like beginning to touch on them. It's hard not to, but when you think about the few core concepts, the conceptual tools that we can use to understand VEI.

What would you bring into this toolbox so that a reader might better understand her life in writing? 

Deborah Casewell: That there are some people who try to systematize Weil's thought and some people who say that you can't systematize Weil's thought. I think I'm probably somewhere more towards the people who try to systemize.

Now, I think an essential part of an essential part of understanding her is to understand that the world is fund is kind of structured and set up in such a way that it runs without the God, without the supernatural, God's kind of abdicated. through the act of creation. And as a result, the universe operates through necessity and through force.

So left to its own devices, the universe, I think, tends towards, towards crushing. people. It sounds very cheerful, but that's, 

Evan Rosa: but that's, but that would be thoughts about both creation and then sort of the abandonment of creation by God. 

Deborah Casewell: Yeah. I mean, for her, it's interesting to use the word abandonment because the word that she used in some of the days is abdication.

Evan Rosa: Abdication. 

Deborah Casewell: That she, that she wants to, that, that she wants people to essentially find their way to God. through the world, because this idea of consent is so important to her, that God can't kind of turn up or be lord of all earth and, you know, cow everybody into obedience. Your obedience to God has to be through your consent.

Evan Rosa: Yeah. 

Deborah Casewell: And her understanding of consent and obedience is so radical that God has to abdicate completely from the world and kind of abandon the world to necessity and force. Such that again, that kind of act of obedience, that love of justice, that love itself becomes the kind of mad counter example to the world.

Evan Rosa: What would you say is her anthropology, her theory of humanity that would sort of ground that centrality of consent? 

Deborah Casewell: I think she sees people as Possessing power and ability and action. So I think in some way there's a, there is, there's always, I think in her anthropology, a tension between activity and passivity.

And I think she sees us as fundamentally active. I think this is actually her Marxism. This is actually kind of like Marxist understanding about human beings, that human, it's human beings are active. They, want to work, they want to labor, and her theory of labor, it draws a lot from Marx's understanding that people need to kind of have worthwhile work.

That's something I really like about her. I find interesting that people have to find, have to work, 

Evan Rosa: and 

Deborah Casewell: we realize our humanity through that kind of activity. But in the practice of attention, your activity becomes a kind of sustained passivity. So you have to kind of transform this natural human tendency to be active into a kind of sustained passivity.

And then I think anthropologically, the idea of activity, the humans being active, also relates to the way in which you want to exercise power over people as well, that the human social relationships involve essentially desires, kind of like relationships of power over one another as well. 

Evan Rosa: Is she also drawing that from Marxism, do you think?

Deborah Casewell: I think a bit, but I think some of it comes from discussions of justice and Greek thought as well. 

Evan Rosa: Well, I was just going to ask about the interplay then between consent and power and the social dynamics of that. 

Deborah Casewell: I think, when I read Are We Struggling for Justice? I, it presents the vision of the world that you find in the Iliad, that the essay that she has on the Iliad, where all human relationships are of force.

force acting to kind of, you know, gain power over the other person, crush the other person, treat the other person as a thing. And what I find interesting and what I want to know what you think about as well in the relationship between kind of power and obedience and consent is that she seems to say that if someone consents in some way to somebody having power over them, then the power that is exercised over them is fundamentally All right, so sometimes I wonder what the, I think there definitely must be resources in her for a kind of power over you that could be good, but I think she sees the best human existence is to be in a state of obedience instead, and so what you have to do is relinquish power over people, so I think there's a complexity there.

Evan Rosa: incredibly nuanced complexity that I think is, you know, most people find incredibly frustrating about the nature of relationships. If we're to like, really like bring this down into lived experience every day, you know, the way that we negotiate our influence over others. And that's kind of where I'm going is, is the way that we attempt to influence either by request or by persuasion.

And then certainly some people take it into force and violence, but how we negotiate power and consent. is really describing and really only gesturing at the complexity of human relationships and the difficulty of, of working together, collaborating and, and the difficulty of finding any kind of functional unity and in a way that would lead to mutual flourishing.

Deborah Casewell: Yeah. I mean, with her, there's, there's two ways of kind of discussing this. The first is to note that she was a very individual. person. And kind of, and despite having the support, support system behind her through her mother that she needed in order to kind of live, she wanted to live a very singular individual life.

She didn't necessarily have the relationships with people where you have to do that give and take so much. She was quite a, she was quite a strong personality, I think as well in that respect. So that's, that's one way you look at the example of her life and how she, She wanted to live her life. The things that she says about how you have to become, you have to do things individually, you can't enter into a collective.

Collectives always subordinate the individual to their collective aims and then they're not personal at all, they're not even impersonal. The idea of gaining impersonality, there's that aspect of it. And then you can look at the way in which she tries to structure societies as well. So looking at her later writings where she's writing the need for roots, for example, where she wants to try and tell you this is what a perfect, it's not a perfect society, but if there's going to be justice in a society.

And she says that in 1940s France, there was not a just society, there was no way, the only thing to do would be just completely wipe that society, you know, completely destroy that society and build a new one from scratch, basically. You look at the principles, and this is what I do like about Simone Weil, is that she's always happy to let contradictions exist.

And so when she describes human nature and the needs of the soul, they're contradictory. They all contradict each other. It's freedom and obedience. People want freedom and they want, and they want obedience. 

Evan Rosa: Yeah. 

Deborah Casewell: Yeah. 

Evan Rosa: Consent and power. Yeah. Yeah. Holding things in tension is something that she, so let's talk a little bit about that because that's a difficult thing to do.

Like I think perhaps, although there's like certain strains of thought and, you know, influence today that try to encourage more holding something in tension. It does seem that we, We're, as a species, committed to some kind of dualism, trying to simplify things down to binaries. 

Deborah Casewell: Yeah, I think people, even if they want to try and avoid dualism, seem to end up in other dualisms.

They just create other dualisms in avoiding in avoiding dualisms. It's very funny. I don't know. It's great. 

Evan Rosa: It is. It's always a kind of boundary, like creating boundaries. It's about categorization. It feels more like things are under control in that way. I mean, to hold tension is to basically like hold a mess in front of you and, and to demand perfect consistency seems psychologically impossible.

Right? Like, I mean, this is Romans 7, it's acrisia, it's like weakness of will. It's just Simone Veil seems to at least be pointing toward attention and like the contradictory nature of life in a way that at least describes it for what it's fascinating in the way in which she sort of is just simply describing the phenomenon and then looking for ways to illuminate that.

In that vein, are there any other philosophical concepts or spiritual concepts, moral concepts that you think are the sort of essential ground level stuff that you have to interact with in order to kind of get where Ve is coming from? 

Deborah Casewell: Yeah, I think you need to understand that she is a dualist. She has that kind of very platonic emphasis in her thought.

She does believe in She does, and founding God found as a kind of absolute reality. I think her understanding of attention, we talked about it a bit, but her understanding of attention is really key, because that's the key to her ethical thought as well, the way in which she says that you should interact with the other person, his attention, but also how you interact with God, that's also through attention as well.

So I think those are probably the key things for me, actually. And I mean, I personally think the way she talks about beauty is very interesting as well. But again, that that's again part of this platonic, the idea that beauty is something which kind of gets you out of yourself. I realized I haven't mentioned suffering, which is very unlike Unlike somebody who talks about they, but I don't, I think I used to be interested in suffering and they, and I'm just not so much anymore.

I think, you know, it's kind of what everyone talks about. Not everyone. 

Evan Rosa: Well, then let's camp out just for like a few brief minutes then on, on what is striking about her approach to beauty. 

Deborah Casewell: I mean, part of the reason that I came to think about beauty is because when you kind of get into the kind of, you know, the whole concept of decreations, like the idea that that's part of what obedience is, it's consent is consent to stop being an I.

Stop being an I so much, stop being so personal and putting yourself out there as a particular thing and to become, you know, to become less, to mimic God in the act of creation's kind of abdication. Like suffering, she talks about affliction, she talks about the afflicted, she talks about suffering as leading to decreation.

But she also talks about experiencing beautiful objects as doing that as well, that when you look at a painting or a particularly beautiful painting or a particularly beautiful object, in that moment your whole attention is filled. with the beautiful object and you are kind of pushed out of yourself as well.

So there's that same de creative thing, which you get from enjoying beautiful objects as well. 

Evan Rosa: So I want to, I'm glad you brought this up because I think de creation is just like this very evocative and also very confusing kind of concept in Weil that I think is like, Really great to be considering here.

So back us up a little bit to help. She's coining the term, as I understand it, that like, decreation has come, this is something unique she's bringing. How would you explain Weil's understanding of decreation? 

Deborah Casewell: I realized when I took, because I talked about the whole idea of her being individual and kind of you being an individual doing, doing these things, it sounds quite contradictory.

What I'm going to say in which is that she also wants you to become less of an individual as well. But yeah. And this is, I think, an interesting contradiction in her thought. But then again, she's not bothered by contradictions. She thinks that thought has to go through contradictions to get anywhere it has to go in the first place.

So there is this contradiction. There's a contradiction at the heart of her heart of decreation, which is the idea that you essentially, if you are kind of left to your own devices, you will take up too much space in being. And so you have to kind of decrease your assertiveness. in the world, in a sense.

That makes it sound very, I don't know, kind of like sort of weirdly psychological, like you're like, I don't know. I feel like I'm sort of doing some kind of reverse things. It's something that you're supposed to do in a motivational speech or something. It does sound good. 

Evan Rosa: Right. And it's also, it also comes across very neurotic.

What role is it playing? Like, is it something she's recommending or describing? 

Deborah Casewell: It's something, so I think she recommends it. Mostly because otherwise there is no space for God to enter into the world again. So part of the decreative process has this kind of ethical aspect where you give space to the other person, whether you are attentive to the other person, whether you work because you don't, because you don't kind of assert yourself, you're open.

So that kind of, if you're linking decreation and attention, it links this idea of openness and impersonality that she wants to develop. But also, when you look at some of her religious writings about it, it's a way of, because God abdicates in the act of creation, your decreation allows God into the world, and it allows God into your being as well.

such that you are able to love like God does because you've gotten rid of the aspects of you which can't love like God or we're not blocking God from entering you and then you're able to love like God and have the attention that you can have to other people it has to sometimes she says it has to be supernatural that's something supernatural has to be given to you to be able to do these things 

Evan Rosa: this is coming as i as i understand it mostly from gravity and grace 

Deborah Casewell: but yeah the note the notebooks yes 

Evan Rosa: yeah and some of that just reads like poetry 

Deborah Casewell: Yeah.

Evan Rosa: These short aphorisms. At, at they, I mean they really come across as almost inscrutable at at times and I think that's part of my experience of like trying to understand this alternation of creation and de creation. Yeah. In Weil, is there an analogous creation and de creation for God that is like sort of divine level and a human level of creation and de creation 

Deborah Casewell: she sees?

I think she's very interested in the crucifixion and I think the crucifixion is one of those kind of, you know, great de statements. 

Evan Rosa: Yeah, but so would be the incarnation and sort of kenosis, right? 

Deborah Casewell: Yeah. 

Evan Rosa: Just sort of self emptying that's there. 

Deborah Casewell: Yeah. In terms of what role it plays in her anthropology, decreation is essentially your way to exist in the world ruled by force and necessity without succumbing to force and necessity.

Because in a way, there's less of you to succumb to force and necessity. So if you decreate in the, in the world as it is, the natural world, then you are able to be open to the links that happen, the links that there are between the world and God. So she has, she takes the kind of platonic idea of metaxu, kind of mediating things between the world and God.

And beauty is one of these kind of mediating 

Evan Rosa: things 

Deborah Casewell: between the world and God. So in that case, I say, anthropologically speaking, then decreation is the way in which you are able to exist in the world and be open to God, but also to be, but also to exist in the world and not do evil as well. 

Evan Rosa: Okay, that's interesting.

That's very interesting. I would love to hear a little bit more on what she thinks beauty is and the human experience of beauty. 

Deborah Casewell: She does think that beauty is one of these links with the supernatural, with God. And so the experience of beauty becomes a de creative, both a de creative kind of event, But also, and as a decreative event, it becomes a way in which God is able to move you from yourself and kind of be there as well.

And so she holds beauty really, really in very, very high, high regard. And she thinks that people need beautiful things and they need experiences of beauty. in order to exist in the world, fundamentally. Or in some ways, beauty helps us exist in the world. If this world is ruled by force and necessity, these flashes of beauty and these flashes of compassion kind of break in, break into the world in which we live in.

and take us out, out of that kind of situation of force for a bit. 

Evan Rosa: It's so fascinating, but she is still a Platonist. And so she's thinking, I mean, is she, is she thinking through the unity of these transcendentals of beauty and truth and goodness? 

Deborah Casewell: She definitely thinks that truth and justice, and I think goodness relate that are kind of the same thing.

I think she definitely does. I think she, she definitely wants to have them anchored. in God, because they are all part of kind of the reality, the truth that God is, even if that truth is sometimes mad and completely counter to the way in which we think we should live or the way in which people do live.

So I would say yes. 

Evan Rosa: As I'm looking at some of my notes here, I just I want to kind of finish up this, this little bit on decreation. It would kind of bring up two, two sides of the same, um, concept, which is rootedness and exile. I think this is again from gravity and grace, just some, some fascinating statements that she offers.

It is necessary to uproot oneself, to cut down the tree and make of it a cross, and then to carry it every day. It is necessary not to be myself, still less to be ourselves. And then she goes on to talk about just the full extent of this uprootedness and this exile, to exile oneself from every earthly country, to do that to others from the outside world.

It's, you can't do that to others, like she's saying, like it's, it's an orientation only toward the self. It's not for exiling others. It has to be a self enacted kind of process. But by uprooting oneself, one seeks greater reality. 

Deborah Casewell: I remember someone reading somewhere that someone that she didn't necessarily advocate the kind of life that she led.

and the kind of extremes that she went to for other people. So when you gave me that quotation, I find it interesting because she writes again about how important rootedness is for people. And she has this kind of very, very interesting analysis of the English as being, you know, more rooted than the French, which is why they're, is why they were better able to resist Hitler during the Second World War.

And you're like, maybe, I don't know. 

Evan Rosa: Did Anglo file apparently. 

Deborah Casewell: Yeah. She's an Anglo. It's funny. It, it, it, it's really funny. But, but especially because I wonder 

Evan Rosa: what soccer team she rooted for. 

Deborah Casewell: I, uh, because, because, because it's, 'cause she writes about how important rootedness is for people and for people in a society.

as well, that when you are building work, when she wants to rebuild France, rebuild French society after the Second World War, where you know, no political parties are allowed whatsoever, she says that people have to feel like they have an attachment to where they are and are rooted in where they are as well.

But she clearly sees herself as not, because I think she sees it Even though people need certain things to live and certain ways to exist to live, she can't, she doesn't want that in some ways. She wants to kind of exile herself. She wants to be turned away from this world and turned towards another reality entirely.

Yeah, and only those people who are turned away from this world and turned towards this other reality can essentially can really lead. This now sounds like the Republic, what I'm saying. It sounds like only those people who don't want to lead have to leave. Only those people, only those people who are like philosophers who have their eyes fixed on the heavens towards the, towards truth, beauty, and goodness are allowed to be in charge.

Everyone else will just do it, everyone else will just end up being obsessed with themselves. 

Evan Rosa: I mean, this is also the Socratic, you know, maxim as well, you know, that, that true wisdom is only found in a kind of like ignorance of one's weakness, a stalwart statement to the contrary, you know, it's only in his thinking himself unwise that Socrates is in fact wise.

Deborah Casewell: He's the wisest man in Athens, yes. 

Evan Rosa: This really does seem to lay bare some of like the contradictory nature of the tension that she's willing to stipulate. And I think the desire to kind of tidy things up, to make sense of it all, it really presses against And I'm going to talk about what they, or maybe how they would be comfortable being read and being understood.

And so I'd love if you could situate her as existentialist and help us to understand the sense in which she kind of fits in that. in that philosophical tradition, or maybe I should just say human tradition. 

Deborah Casewell: Yes. I mean, some genealogies of existentialism say that thinkers like Socrates, like Pascal, are particularly existentialists.

And so I think of a, as that kind of existentialist. When we think of existentialism nowadays, we tend to think, I suppose, the kind of the French existentialist, the kind of, you know, the atheistic Camus Saint Beauvoir strand of existentialism, but she's, but she's much more, more like the kind of some of the religious existentialists at the time, even though she didn't, I think, have so much contact with them as they had, you know, they didn't have so much contact with them.

And who are 

Evan Rosa: you thinking of? 

Deborah Casewell: like Berdyev, for example. So Berdyev has also similar ideas about God as he has similar ideas of, of this kind of relationship between nothingness and the void and God, but he sources it in Schelling. So he has this kind of Schellingian account of creative freedom that's kind of comes out from nothingness.

And so that's what I was thinking. I was thinking about people like Berdyev. I think he ki and get, get, like, get talked about in relation to each other quite a lot. Ki was being translated into French, but there's no evidence really that she read more than one book of kis and that Oh, interesting. The existentialist one really, it was, it wasn't the kind of the classic, it wasn't kind of the concept of anxiety or the sickness under death or something.

Evan Rosa: Hmm. 

Deborah Casewell: So I think in, in as far as she displays existentialist thoughts and themes in her work, she strikes me more as a religious existentialist. Rather than the kind of start, you know, essences, you know, existence proceeds, essence, that kind of on ontology of kind of account of nothingness and phenomenology.

I think that their thing, but she, which she develops this kind of way of life and this kind of relationship between God and the void and nothingness, I think is existential. 

Evan Rosa: Yeah. So then what might be the role of God in her existentialism? 

Deborah Casewell: I mean, for her God is the ultimate reality, but also God is love and so.

The goal of human existence, I think, is to return to God and consent to God. That's the goal of human life. 

Evan Rosa: I love that. What would that mean in a person's life? 

Deborah Casewell: What would that mean in a person's life? I, so again, it's to do with this, the, the prioritization of the self. So it's, what are you paying attention to?

Are you paying attention to yourself? Are you paying attention to the people? who are exciting, who are grabbing your attention, who are, you know, kind of out there pushing themselves out there, or are you giving your attention to that which is not obvious? And so when you consent to God, when you are able to love like God does and love in the mad way that God does, then you'll be able to kind of look beyond, I suppose, the world of appearances and be able to see the world as it really is and relate to the world and to God as they really are.

rather than what people might want them to be or what people would like themselves to be either. 

Evan Rosa: Yeah. I feel like this is probably a good step back into, I mean, but toward, are we struggling for justice? 

Deborah Casewell: Yeah. 

Evan Rosa: So maybe we could start there with how she thinks about the madness of Christ. 

Deborah Casewell: Yes, it comes from a series of writings that she wrote when she was in London in the 1940s, when she was working for the Free French kind of organization in Mayfair, actually.

And it's part of her vision for what society should be like and what people in society should be like. And so she kind of wanders about, about the France that she'd left behind and the France that she wants to go back to. And it kind of, slightly suicidal manner, she wants to go back to France, and she's expressing what should true justice look like, what does it mean to be just?

And, and so, and so, she starts by going back to kind of a particular instantiation of what was called justice in by the, by, by the, um, by the millions in, in relation to the city of Melos, where they were, where they said that justice is those who are strong, do what they want, and the weak just have to accept it.

The justice is as strong doing what they want, and the weak just have to. live with what the strong have decided. And then she says, this is all of realpolitik. That's, that's the kind of the way in which we understand, which justice is being expressed these days, that there is no kind of understanding of justice as something that is good, that should be strived for.

It's just the strongest wrong in the week a week. That's what she sees as essentially What's been happening in the war as well, that it's just the stronger being able to do what they want and the weak just have to live with it. 

Evan Rosa: So, so into this, she's bringing, she's drawing a different picture of what she's hoped, how we ought to think about justice though.

And so, so set that up a little bit through the lens of, I think, a kind of The madness of love. Love as a kind of madness. 

Deborah Casewell: Yes. So, so she says that the just, the Greeks define justice, first of all, as kind of mutual consent, which is admirable. And so she says, and then she says that then Love is kind of, you know, she says, where there is agreement by mutual consent, there is justice, say, there always is a loyal city.

And she says, this makes the opposition of the just and the possible in the words quite clear. So if there is equal sense that equal strengths, there is consent, but if there's not equal strengths, then, then we tend to move more towards one person not requiring consent. If there's no equality, there's no kind of extent.

And so she then says that human beings then tend to If they have power, just do what they want. So that is kind of the natural. So, so if she starts off applying it to countries, and then she says, this is actually what happens to humans as well. If there's no obstacle to humans desire, they just, they get what they want.

fundamentally. And so people then kind of see that as natural. But the person who is mad, the person who was mad with love, cares about those people who haven't been able to give their consent, haven't even been asked for their consent. The person who is mad with justice and mad with love cares about that and cries out for justice about that as well.

And in doing so does things which seem mad. 

Evan Rosa: There's a passage at the bottom of page three into page four. I'd love for you to read. 

Deborah Casewell: So she says, the madness of love, once it has seized a human being, completely transforms the modalities of action and thought. It is akin to the madness of God. The madness of God consists in needing man's free consent.

Men mad with love for their fellows suffer under the thought that everywhere in the world human beings serve as intermediaries to the will of others without having consented to it. They find it unbearable to know that this is often true of their own will, and of that of the groups to which they belong.

In all their actions and thoughts relating to human beings, whatever be the nature of their relation, each man, without exception, appears to them as constituted by a faculty to consent freely to the goods through love, a faculty imprisoned in the soul and in flesh. It is not doctrines, conceptions, inclinations, intentions, wants, which thus transform the mechanism of human thought.

For this madness is needed. 

Evan Rosa: For this madness is needed. So I mean, she's depicting madness as an orientation toward the self and toward the world, which is, it seems to be the only way to. to struggle for justice. 

Deborah Casewell: Yes. 

Evan Rosa: Help us understand that. I mean, like, I mean, and in what sense is it madness? Is it just sort of madness in relation to a kind of like the broad conception of how life ought to go?

The status quo or the way societies tend to kind of go with through inertia? 

Deborah Casewell: Yeah, it's quite, it's kind of the way of the world. She thinks that people, when they are in groups, they form collectives and they then let the They let the collective decide everything or they sacrifice their desires or their needs for the need of the collective.

That's sort of what happens in society. We, we lose track of our, of what might be actually important, what your needs are, and it always gets subordinated to some kind of collective which can never ever actually satisfy people because it only wants to satisfy itself. So she kind of, that's the idea of the society is a kind of a great beast and plato, something which, which is, which kind of just isn't attentive to people.

It's just attentive to itself, fundamentally. And so the whole structure of human life, the whole structure of human existence is set up, as you say, the status quo, it's set up to let the people who are strong do what they want, or it's set up to let things always, you know. will always take over even if you haven't even consented to doing that sometimes.

Sometimes you don't, sometimes you never consent, sometimes you don't even know that you have to consent. And so in terms of this madness of love, she's quite clear that only a few people are going to feel this way and have these desires and have these, have this desire for justice, have this madness of love.

Only a few people can have it. And those few people are mad, but they're essential. 

Evan Rosa: It's hard not to think of Nietzsche's Madman. And yeah, the sort of, just how unique that, that experience is, you know? So then what is the, is it the role of a prophet? A witness? What is the role the mad man plays in society?

Deborah Casewell: I think for her, the role of a mad person or the madman in society, I mean, she's using 

Evan Rosa: such gendered language here, but, uh, 

Deborah Casewell: I, it's, I suppose it's to kind of stand outside society and call, call that society to something better, but it's also there to just be mad as well. And to then in that madness of love, actually attend to the people who need to be attended to.

Evan Rosa: Because it seems then it's a sort of, it's so unique because you can't intentionally inhabit both spheres, right? You can't. inhabit. I mean, this is the way it seems to read to me. You can't inhabit both the sphere of the reasonable and the powerful, as well as the mad and the thirsty and hungry for justice.

You can't stand in both worlds. They're at odds. So that in that sense, you can't occupy it for the sake of utility. You really have to And this is perhaps another sense in which she's like truly existentialist is that is the importance of truly inhabiting it in a way that is wholehearted. 

Deborah Casewell: Yes. I mean, in some ways it's, it's kind of interesting, an interesting, I suppose, Reversal or a kind of you a or, or a kind of take.

Now, now, now she died. She died before SART published these things. So that's, that's so there's no kind of, you know, relation that I'm drawing there. But man, but you know, in, in the 1945 lecture, existentialism is existentially, humanism, SART says that man is nothing but what he makes of himself. And that when you as a human being choose any kind of role, any kind of, you know.

Any kind of, you know, make you make any decision in life, you make that decision for all humanity. So you kind of create and make yourself an example of what humanity is for all humanity. And so for her, I see that she does in some way make herself an example. for all humanity as well. She kind of does that kind of living of her life and she makes herself an exemplar.

Evan Rosa: Is she seeking madness, personally? 

Deborah Casewell: I think she thinks that, I think she, she's not seeking it, but she knows that what she, she knows that what she knows and she knows that the way in which she acts is mad. But then, and actually, I don't know, having said that, maybe she is because one of her, one of her great role models is Antigone and she's just like, Antigone is, And so, but she's right.

In both of these, in both of these articles, in both kind of, you know, Are We Struggling For Justice? And then the person, she talks about Antigone, she talks about the madness. I mean, I mean, she's not, she doesn't directly say it in Are We Struggling For Justice? It's that madness. It's that madness of following the law.

The supernatural law rather than the natural law. That the natural world and the natural law works one way, it's all realpolitik, it's, you know, the strong is strong, the weak just have to, have to suffer. But there's the real supernatural law, which is mad. And it doesn't try to make accommodations and get on with the world and deal with tricky situations.

It's just mad. 

Evan Rosa: Yeah. So Simone Weil, you, I mean, I've learned through you, has this fascinating interest in Antigone. I'm wondering if you can both give us like a, you know, for readers that haven't read Antigone, give us like the brief movements of that Greek tragedy and, and then what was Weil's interest in Antigone?

And where does it fit in her thought? 

Deborah Casewell: So the, the story of Antigone is a continuation of the Oedipus story. She's a, she's a daughter of Oedipus. And after Oedipus exile, the two sons essentially fight each other for control of the kingdom. And in the fight, they're both killed. And Creon, who is Antigone's uncle, decides that the best way to preserve peace in the city is to have won.

son buried with the full proper Greek burial rites and the other one left to be rotten, be eaten by dogs, which in Greek thought would have meant that his spirit never reached the underworld and says that anyone who disturbs the body or does anything to kind of, you know, give it funeral rites will be put to death.

And so in the night, Antigone sprinkles some dust on the body and performs some of the funeral rites. She's seen and the next night she's caught and Creon's given this edict that anyone doing it will be put to death. So he has to then put His own niece who is coincidentally engaged to his son to death.

And so they have this kind of long discussion, which, which Simone Weil has always found interesting where, where he, where, where, where he kind of justifies what he's done and she justifies what she's done. And she says, well, I've obeyed the unwritten laws. You're, you're, you're, you have the written laws, but I, I am obedient to the unwritten laws.

And then that she's sent to be walled off, walled off. And then the prophet comes and, tells Creon if he does that it's going to lead, it's going to lead to terrible outcomes, which it does anyway. So he unawards her. It turns out that she's hung herself. And so at that point, his son commits suicide. And then, and then he goes back and it turns out his wife committed suicide as well.

So that is in broad strokes, the Greek tragedy. But Simone Weil found the figure of Antigone. Inspiring and deeply interesting and she comes back to this, she comes back to the story a few times. She kind of gives it as an example to workers in a to to workers in a journal of a factory work it's called.

And then she writes about anti in. a few of her texts as well, talking about the mad, her madness, but her madness being reasonable, being actually the right response. She says in the, in the eyes of the natural situation, of course Creon's right. Of course, you've got a, you've got, you've got a city that's completely, you know, at war with itself that needs some kind of ritual, some kind of thing to calm it down, to ease it, to mean that they can move on from that terrible chapter and go on with their lives.

But in doing so, you have to commit a great act of evil. You have to stop somebody, somebody's soul going down to the afterlife. And so Antigone says the justice. The justice that I owe is not to the city. It's not so that the city can, you know, continue its life and move on. The justice that I owe is to the supernatural law, to these more important primordial laws that actually govern the life and death situations and the kind of the, the soul, the situation of your soul as well.

And that's why she does what she does. She's obedient to the unwritten law. rather than the written law. And so Creon tells her, go on then and love the dead. But in some ways, Simone Veil says that's, that was the right thing to have done. It was the right thing to have done, to have loved the dead for the sake of justice, rather than have to attend it to the living for the sake of expediency.

Evan Rosa: Yeah. And this is coming from, uh, another essay, what is sacred in every human being, but, um, this is Veil saying, in effect, this was the right place for Antigone, for the unwritten law that this little girl obeyed. It was far from having anything in common with any rites or with the natural. It was nothing other than the extreme love, the absurd love, that pushed Christ onto the cross.

Deborah Casewell: And so she makes, she kind of like sees Antigone as a Christ figure. That kind of madness of the love is that, is the right kind of love, is the right kind of, is the right kind of justice, but it is not human justice. Human justice finds its way and does other things and stuff. see other things as important, but Antigone has the clarity to do that.

And Antigone is the only one with only one in that situation with the clarity to know what is really important, even though. It's not. 

Evan Rosa: This is fascinating because it sort of reveals the sense in which, I mean, like the way that like madness is in the eye of the beholder in this case, right? Like one, one's one person's madness is another person's reason.

And in this case, it's very much the subversive kind of approach of Antigone of Christ that it's in that sense that this madness is in fact reasonable. It's because the context, the societal context that Creon. or that the rest of the world, those with power operate within is really upside down. It's upside down in some important sense that only the mad can, can really have access to, and, or access to see, and, and the ability to point out.

Deborah Casewell: Yes, and in some way, the idea that the love of God and the justice of God is always going to be mad in the eyes of the world, because God's in some way, again, God's abdicated from the world, and so the only kind of power and love that we have in the world is not the right kind. You have to go to the supernatural.

Find the right kind of love and the right kind of justice. Yeah. And so, so she definitely thinks that it's not easy to fight or to struggle for justice. Um, and so she says that the spirit of justice has to be the same as the power of love. So she says that the spirit of justice is nothing other than the supreme and perfect flower of the madness of love.

And the madness of love turns compassion into a far more powerful motive for any kind of action. including fighting, then splendor, glory, or even honor. And so she says it compels one to abandon everything for compassion, and as St Paul says of Christ, to empty oneself entirely of that. That's how the figure of Christ comes into this idea of the madness of love.

It's that kind of mad, self emptying act completely. And it's the one thing she says, it's the only thing that means that you are able to love. properly, because to love properly and therefore to be just properly, you have to love like Christ does, which is love to the extent that you empty yourself and, you know, die on a cross fundamentally.

And once she can do that, she says that you can love properly, you can love everybody, you can discern and cherish equally in all human milieu, without exception, in all parts of the globe, the fragile earthly capacities of beauty, happiness, and fulfillment, and to want to preserve them all, so to go against the nature of the world, it's that love that has to drive you.

And she says, it's only that love that you can consent to, that's the only kind of love that you will ever want to be fully obedient to. as well. 

Evan Rosa: Heather's fascinating. She thinks she says about like, I guess the power and extent of that love and compassion as well, that I'm just continuing here. The madness of love imbues a part of the heart deeper than indignation and encourage the place from which indignation encouraged draw their strength with tender compassion for the enemy.

This kind of will to, is it a will to suffer? Is it a kind of, And this is, I think, maybe some of Ve's detractors kind of come, might come through at this point. Is it a Is it an unhealthy desire to suffer? 

Deborah Casewell: Yeah, I mean, I, I suppose in some ways she sees it as inevitably incurring suffering just by its nature.

But then, as I didn't dwell on, she does see suffering as one of the ways in which you. Imitate Christ, imitate God, and decreate yourself. So in some ways she probably does want to have that suffering, but then you also consent to that suffering, you consent to that suffering too. 

Evan Rosa: Yeah. I mean, but like I'm continuing again, sometimes all I can do with they is read it, quote it and just let it sit.

I mean, she's, what I love about the way she writes is she'll in turns. Kind of become colloquial in a way that is sort of feels so familiar and easy. And then also in turns, just say things that are absolutely perplexing. And yes, it's provocative and perplexing, right? So she'll say, I mean, this truly is madness.

It hurls one into risks one cannot run. If one has given one's heart to anything at all, That belongs to this world. And the outcome to which the madness of love led Christ is after all, no recommendation for it. Yeah. So, I mean, it's again, the sense in which like, there are so few of the mad, there are so few people who live in this way.

And yet it's a description of, of a way of being in the world. That is simultaneously, I mean, am I right to say simultaneously a depiction of what is true and just and beautiful, and yet also not to be recommended. You can't, it's inaccessible in certain ways. 

Deborah Casewell: Well, it's completely unreasonable. As she says, we are reasonable people.

We've got to concern us over the great matters of the world, but there are these mad people. But, and it's interesting how she seems to say that for those people who love like this, that it's a compulsion, they are unreasonable. There's no, that's how it is with the world. There are just these mad people, but most people are not.

It's almost quite depressing, actually, because you get the kind of the way in which the world is and these few mad people, just these 

Evan Rosa: few people. So I really like this paragraph of hers, the way she ends it, basically, if the order of the universe. 

Deborah Casewell: Yeah, but if the order of the universe is a wise order, there must sometimes be moments when from the point of view of earthly reason, only the madness of love is reasonable.

Such moments can only be those when, as today. Mankind has become mad from want of love. Is it certain today that the madness of love may not be capable of providing the unhappy masses, hungry in body and soul, with a food far easier for them to digest than our inspirations from a less lofty source? So then, being what we are, is it certain that we are at our post in the camp of justice?

Evan Rosa: Let's think about some takeaways like from this, right? Like, because she's, here she comes back, right? And here's where, you know, the contradictions come back to that, even though it's not to be recommended. Even though it's completely unreasonable, from a, from another perspective, from a loftier view, only the madness of love is reasonable.

Deborah Casewell: Only the madness of love can be the kind of love that actually helps people in the world. Fundamentally, that people, even though they know it's mad and they find it mad and they sometimes rather not see it, they need that kind of love and they need people who love in that kind of way. Even if it's not the majority, people still need that.

And so in some way, the way in which she is and the way in which she sees Christ being is, is, is an, is indispensable. You know, the path that you have to go down has nothing to recommend, she says, in the eyes of the reasonable world, nothing to recommend it. But it's the only just thing to do. It's the only just and loving thing to do in the end.

Evan Rosa: I mean, it really helps to come back to that bit of, you know, the ways in which we uproot ourselves. It's necessary to uproot oneself, to cut down the tree, make of it a cross, and carry it every day. And that kind of madness, of love. I'm just, I'm so hung up on like the reasonableness of this and, but there's a kind of, there's a kind of sense to it.

There's a sense of, 

Deborah Casewell: there is, yeah, it does make sense. I think in some ways that there are the way in which the world works, it works in its reasonable way most of the time, but there are these, these, again, it's like our understanding of beauty and of joy as well, that there are just sometimes these shafts of light that shine down through the clouds of your existence.

And there are some people who are just able to kind of, you know, Embody that as well and love in the way, love, love in the way that you're supposed to love. And they are the true just people.

Evan Rosa: Deborah, thank you so much for, for reflecting on Weil's life or thought, really the madness of Simone Weil to, to her readers and detractors alike. I, you've only made me think, yeah, there's still So much invade that that is worthwhile. So thank you so much for joining me. 

Deborah Casewell: Yeah, thank you again. 

Evan Rosa: is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Deborah Casewell, production assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, Emily Brookfield, Zoë Halaban, and Kacie Barrett. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online@faith.yale.edu or life worth living.yale.edu.

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