Devoured by God: Cannibalism, Mysticism, and Ethics in Simone Weil.

Vishnu, seeing you brush

the clouds with flames

of countless colors,

your mouths agape,

your huge eyes blazing

my inner self quakes...

Seeing the fangs

Protruding 

from your mouths

like the fires of time,

I lose my bearings...

Bhagavad Gita [1]

He really appears to feel himself being devoured from within. Without doubt this is true, but he does not suspect that he is eating himself.

Anthropologist's description of a Tibetan spiritual practitioner, copied by Simone Weil in her notebook, January 1942 [2]

God wants to eat our flesh. Those who have seen him [3] know this. Arjuna, in the Bhagaved Gita, is in no doubt on the question. When Krishna/Vishnu reveals the totality of his cosmic form in the poem's famous eleventh chapter, Arjuna cries out: "Rushing through I your fangs / into grim / mouths,/ [men] are dangling / from heads / crushed / between your teeth. ... Homage to you. Best of Gods!" (Gita, 102-3)

We know other connoisseurs of God's hunger: the bhakti poets of South India, medieval Christian mystics like the Flemish beguine Hadewijch. Or, closer to us, an avid latter-day reader of the Bhagavad Gita: the French philosopher, political activist, and mystic Simone Weil. Weil died in 1943, at the age of 34, a victim of tuberculosis and of self-imposed food austerities she understood as obedience to God's love. In a notebook, along with passages from the Gita, Weil had copied a fragment from Heraclitus: "'Mortals are immortals and immortals are mortals, living each other's death and dying each other's life."' Weil's exegesis: "To live the death of a being is to eat it. The reverse is to be eaten. Man eats God and is eaten by God" (OC VI.2.,454). A year and a half after writing these lines, Weil herself was dead, consumed by mycobacterium tuberculosis, by self-starvation, perhaps by the God she yearned to encounter in the depths of affliction.

It has become standard practice among liberal commentators to praise Simone Weil's contributions to philosophy and political theory, while deploring the psychological wounds and theological distortions that led Weil to her extravagant self-mortification. For many, Weil was a brilliant philosopher whose gifts were undermined by archaic religious beliefs, self-hatred aimed at her identity as a woman and a Jew, and the effects of anorexia nervosa. This is not my view. Or rather these are not the aspects of Weil's thought I find it most useful to emphasize. It is true and important that Weil internalized the patterns of social denigration connected with her status as a Jewish woman intellectual in France between the World Wars. Yet Weil's self-hatred and anorexia (if that's what they were) did not stop her from discerning certain truths with redoubtable lucidity. Above all, I think Weil was right about God. If God exists, he has an ogre's appetite for human flesh. And maybe the vocation of flesh, ours and his, i s to be eaten.

In the Bible and in Christian theological literature, the violence of God has been variously described, celebrated, qualified, justified. Military, judicial, and paternal metaphors predominate, presenting God by turns as a triumphant warrior, a stern judge, a father obliged to punish his children for their own good. Recent feminist and other progressive theo/thealogians have expressed dismay at the violence attributed to God. They have proposed new theological metaphors intended to downplay the savage, irrational side of the divine. This attitude is more than understandable. Yet something crucial is lost when we set out to construct an image of God or the sacred from which the violent, frightening aspects have been purged. I suspect that such bowdlerization moves our God-talk farther away from, not closer to, the heart of most people's experience of relation to the divine.

Under these circumstances, a different set of symbols -- whose relationship to violence is ambiguous -- may shed fresh light. Engaging with disturbing sides of tradition, rather than rejecting them out of hand, we can examine God's violence through the lens of food and eating, acknowledging the savagery that saturates eating processes: at once shocking and ineluctable, life-destroying and essential to the furtherance of life. This is the line of thought I want to explore, in the difficult company of Simone Weil.

Economies of violence -- of eating and being eaten -- are inescapable in our world, Weil believes. But this fact shouldn't push us to despair. Eating is the mechanism of our enslavement and ultimate annihilation. It is also and for that very reason our source of hope. This paradox is at the root of Weil's sacramental vision of a savage communion between humans and God. Will the fresh range of metaphors Weil applies to God's violence make that violence less scandalous? Certainly not. If anything, like Kierkegaard, Well aimed to heighten our sense of scandal, paradox, and moral anguish in thinking about God. Yet Weil may help us to face God's violence lucidly, rather than avert our eyes in denial or despair. Accepted as an instrument of spiritual transformation, God's violent hunger may offer the best chance to break the hold of human, all-too-human brutality.

Hunger, Necessity, and "Cannibal Love"

Eating is a scandal at the heart of human life. On the one hand because eating implies dismemberment and destruction of that which is consumed: we live by making other beings die. On the other hand because eating reveals a contradiction in the basic structure of human desire. We long to be united with objects and beings outside ourselves, and eating -- actual incorporation of an object into our own substance -- constitutes the ultimate form of union. We instinctively measure all other forms of intimacy against the fusional bliss eating (momentarily) provides. Yet eating annihilates objects as independent entities, stealing them from us at the very instant we are joined to them most fully. Without union of substances, knowledge remains external, detached, incomplete. Yet when substances unite, intimacy vanishes in its own consummation. Simone Weil brings this irreducible conflict into sharp focus, and uses it to build a tragic anthropology: "The great sorrow of human life is that looking and eating are two dif ferent operations. ... Children already feel this sorrow, when they look at a cake for a long time and take it almost regretfully to eat it, yet without being able to resist." [4] We are driven to seek union with the world. Yet our craving destroys the very beings we reach out to know and love. "Only on the other side of the sky," Weil writes, "in the country inhabited by God," are looking and eating "one and the same" (AD, 156).

In the mundane sphere, the essence of hunger is the "inability to resist." Hunger brings the daily demonstration that our will is not free, that our bodies are inhabited-constituted--by forces over which we can exert only the most limited and fleeting control. The point is an obvious one, yet frequently ignored (by those with full bellies). For her part, Simone Weil made hunger and eating central to her inquiries into all dimensions of the human condition. Food, she observed in a notebook entry, is "the irreducible" (OC VI.2.441).

In her early political writings, Weil explored how humans' fundamental bodily needs, above all the need for food, grounded social oppression. During her year as an unskilled factory worker in the depths of economic depression (1934-35), Weil observed first hand how the threat of unemployment and thus of starvation blunted workers' will to resist. At all levels of a hierarchically ordered society, Weil theorized, hunger's menace constitutes the glue assuring social cohesion, that is, guaranteeing the continued subjection of the oppressed.

From early on, the imperiousness of hunger became for Weil a moral and metaphysical issue, as well as a political problem. Weil saw in bodily hunger one of the most powerful expressions of the principle she referred to as "necessity." For Weil, a matrix of ineluctable laws and force-relations governs material reality both macrocosmically and microcosmically, shaping the universe as a whole and the intimate processes of our bodies and minds. "This sensible universe where we find ourselves has no reality other than necessity." [5]

Necessity commands an interplay of material forces which sets strict limits on human autonomy. While no pure determinist, Weil was convinced that much secular moral theory relies on an overly optimistic view of human freedom. Kant's claims notwithstanding, our moral freedom is drastically constrained by a variety of physical factors, among which hunger reigns supreme. In her notebooks, Weil frequently recopied a brief passage drawn from the Iliad, illustrating this point. The scene in question concerns Niobe, whose anguish and moral outrage at the death of her child flag as her own body's need for food reasserts itself. "And she thought of eating, when she was tired of tears." For Weil, this simple incident lays bare the power of hunger to thwart noble values and unravel our most treasured relationships. A mother's devotion to her child symbolizes love and commitment to the other. Homer's stark lines reveal how quickly such altruistic principles surrender to the power of physical need. The need to eat underm ines our moral capacities and transforms rational beings into greedy animals.

Thus it would be deeply wrong to think of hunger as a "merely" physical phenomenon, incapable of impairing our moral, spiritual, and relational capacities. On the contrary, hunger illustrates in Weil's view the perpetual vulnerability of so-called higher, "spiritual" goods to the pressure of physical force.

But the problem is deeper. Hunger is more than an alien power assaulting our capacity for moral relation from the outside. We have internalized the paradigm of craving and consumption, and this paradigm governs the world of our relationships from within. Put another way, not only can the need to eat temporarily suspend our concern with morality, but the dynamics of greedy consumption infiltrate the substance of our relationships on an ongoing basis: even and perhaps above all relationships with those people we claim to love. We desire others as objects to satisfy our psychological and physical cravings. Driven by ego needs deeply analogous to hunger, we are caught in what Weil terms "cannibal love."

If physical hunger or its implied threat assures the stability of the social order as a whole, hunger in the form of psychological cannibalism is the binding agent in our intimate interpersonal relationships. The driving force in our love relations is not disinterested valuation of the other's beauty, nor moral commitment to her welfare. The force in love is the rage of our own hunger to use the other as a means to fill (or at least conceal) our psychological voids, and to enhance our power. The overflowing, giddy energy we experience during the brief flourishing of a new romance is the empirical demonstration that in love we metabolize the other being. "We love as cannibals," Weil writes. "Beloved beings...provide us with comfort, energy, a stimulant. They have the same effect on us as a good meal after an exhausting day of work. We love them, then, as food. It's an anthropophagic love." [6]

Weil is offering more than the banal observation that we sometimes behave selfishly toward those we love. In love, cannibalism is not an exception, an occasional cloud drifting across the otherwise tranquil sky. It is the sky, the very structure and substance of the relationship. And this is so not because we moderns are an especially sinful and depraved. segment of historical humanity (although Weil thinks this is also true), but simply because human selves, doing what we do naturally -- that is, positing ourselves as the center of the universe -- cannot love in any other way. It is less a question of individual guilt than of a structural aspect of human selfhood as such. The exploitative, assimilative mode of relationship flows inevitably from the configuration of the self. Psychological like physical hunger is an expression less of individuality than of a trans-personal necessity. We need energy (psychic and physical) to live. We obtain that energy from the most convenient source. Approaching another huma n being we may claim to love and respect, we are in reality vampires in search of a meal. "We love someone," Weil writes, "that is to say, we love to drink his blood" (CS, 250).

Divine Hunger and the Surrender of the Self

The cyclical rhythm of devouring and digesting is anchored in the fabric of our being. Creatures of flesh, our business is to eat and be eaten. The structures of our humanness constrain us to anthropophagy (physical and psychological), just as the structure of matter demands that our bodies' movements conform to the law of gravity. Are we, then, condemned always to reproduce the same roles in the same monotonous cannibalistic dramas?

For Simone Weil, as long as we live, we cannot disentangle ourselves completely from the cannibalistic economy. Yet Weil believed this economy offers not only constraints, but also opportunities. Put another way, there will always be anthropophagy. But there are different ways to resolve the questions of who eats whom, and how.

To talk about eating is to talk about violence, but also about a transformation of substance. It is this transformative aspect Weil will seek to bring forward in her analysis of the human condition from the point of view of eating as sacrifice and sacralization. For Weil, the key to a sacramental transformation of human existence is a shift in our self-positioning and practice within the economy of feeding and consumption: from the eaters we have always "naturally" striven to be, we must become the eaten; instead of predators, prey. Yet in Weil's system of paradox and inversion, to become food means the opposite of passive victimhood. To be eaten -- eaten in the right, sacralizing way -- signifies an increase of power and efficacy, a release of creative energy for the common good. Cannibalism won't go away; but its consequences change radically when the victim enters consciously, willingly into the process, investing it with a sacrificial character. Under these conditions, Weil argues, reversing its status a s the visible mark of human enslavement, the violence of eating would become an instrument--the decisive instrument--of spiritual liberation and positive moral change.

A sense of discomfort arises (I hope) immediately. Is the ground being prepared here for an attempt to revalorize women's sacrifice, passivity, and victimhood: the very oppressive ideological motifs against which feminist theory and feminist theo/thealogy have waged some of their most important campaigns? A final assessment of Weil's proposal must wait until we have been able to spell out her view in detail. But from the start it's obvious that the dangerous, disturbing concept of sacrifice is at the center of Weil's thinking. This is not the least reason why Weil herself disturbs us as she does and should. Looking at Weil's theory of eating, violence, and sacramental transformation, we are also necessarily asking what relevance, if any, the concept of sacrifice might still have to the religious and political lives we shape for ourselves and picture for our children, especially our daughters. Is the model of sacrifice, as some contemporary thinkers have claimed, a dangerous archaism which should be purged fr om our cultural imaginary? Or does this ancient, ambiguous, and abused term offer resources still indispensable if we mean to engage constructively with our religious traditions, and with our lives?

Simone Weil's answer to this question is clear. For Weil, the cannibal (that is, all of us) can be redeemed only through a sacralizing transformation for which the vocabulary of sacrifice remains uniquely appropriate. The process Weil describes involves a double movement: two distinct stages, or perhaps more accurately two interpenetrating dimensions of eating/being eaten. We are eaten by God, in order then to become food for our fellow human beings. Only after having once been consumed and digested by God, Weil maintains, can our substance effectively nourish the people around us. Thus, the way to break the cycle of "cannibalistic" exploitation among humans is not so much a movement of renunciation as a new mode of eating. The devouring violence of God must be positively harnessed in order to dismantle the machinery of human cruelty.

In exploring the model of a positive experience of God's rending and eating of human flesh, Weil shows affinities with earlier writers from a variety of spiritual traditions who evoked intimacy with God through images of incorporation. Caroline Walker Bynum has pointed out similarities between Weil's thought and the writings and practices of medieval Christian women mystics. In the late Middle Ages, food and food practices served as a privileged medium enabling women to link experiences of God's violence with the passionate raptures of divine love. Eucharistic mysticism furnished a framework in which medieval holy women like Hadewijch and Catherine of Siena could report experiences of eating and being eaten by Christ, literal incorporation into the suffering flesh of the Savior. In her poem "Love's Seven Names," Hadewijch wrote:

"... love's most intimate union / Is through eating, tasting and seeing interiorly. / He eats us; we think we eat him, / And we do eat him, of this we can be certain." [7] Bynum comments that in these verses, "eating is a central metaphor not merely because the eucharist is the place in Christian ritual in which God is most intimately received but also because to eat and to be eaten express the interpenetration and mutual engulfing... Hadewijch saw as necessary for uniting with a God-who-is-man" (HE 156). For Hadewijch and other medieval women, the medium of mystical union is ecstatic love, and "To love is to engulf and be engulfed, to masticate and to assimilate, to flow out with nurture so that one's body becomes food for another" (HF, 157). A similar dynamic of sacrificial love and "becoming food" structures Simone Weil's mystical theology. For Weil, too, the edible body forms a crossroads for the encounter of humanity and divinity, violence and love, sacrificial death and the renewal of life.

In crucial passages of her writings, Weil figures the relationship between human beings and God through "eating" metaphors. The highest vocation of the human soul is to find an intimacy with God the least inadequate image of which is eating, incorporation, literally being taken into the substance of the other. Sometimes Weil engages explicitly with previous articulations of this view in Christian and other traditions, as in her discussion of the Heraclitean fragment cited earlier, or the notebook entry where she copies out and analyzes the translated liturgy of the Tibetan tcheud ritual, a meditational visualization in which practitioners offer their bodies to be consumed by gods and "starving demons." Weil carefully notes the words of the liturgy:

"Today, I pay my debts, offering to destruction this body I have loved and cared for so much.

I give my flesh to those who are hungry, my blood to those who are thirsty, my skin to cover those who are naked, my bones as fuel to those who suffer from the cold....

Shame upon me if I shrink back from this sacrifice. Shame upon you, if you do not dare accept it." (OC VI.2., 439-40)

Weil's notebook entry continues with the comment that "the initiate -- in silence, imagining himself a little heap of ashes in a lake of black mud -- must understand that this sacrifice was only an illusion born of pride. Once the goal has been attained, one no longer needs the rite."

Weil's study of such motifs influenced her own speculations about human relationship to the divine. God's eating becomes one of the key modes through which this relation is grasped. In a striking text, Weil notes how reverence for the beauty of the created world lures the soul into a love for the Creator of this world of beauty. The consummation of this love comes through God's "eating and digestion" of the human soul. Weil writes: "The beauty of the world is the entrance of the labyrinth. The imprudent person who, having entered, takes a few steps, is after some time unable to find his way back.... If he doesn't lose courage, if he continues to walk, it is absolutely certain that he will arrive at the center of the labyrinth. And there, God is waiting for him, to eat him. Later, he will leave again, but changed, become other [devenu autre], having been eaten and digested by God" (AD, 122).

The model of being "eaten by God" and thereby "becoming other" is linked with Well's concept of spiritual "decreation": the mystical operation by which the structures of the individual ego are dissolved, revealing a void which for Weil is the fundamental emptiness at the core of human selfhood. The phenomenal (and essentially illusory) aspects of the personality are eaten away by contact with the divine, leaving at last only the emptiness which is the space that can be filled by God. (Weil was no doubt drawn to the Tibetan tcheud rite because there, too, it is the fundamental emptiness of the self which is to be experienced through a meditational visualization that offers up the initiate's body as food to supernatural beings).

To be eaten of course involves suffering, but for Well suffering can be submitted to in such a way as to catalyze a positive transformation: "By suffering, one wears out the I." And wearing out the ego means revealing it as having been all along an essentially illusory construction. Weil formulates this idea in characteristically paradoxical terms: "Once one has understood that one is nothing, the goal of all one's efforts is to become nothing. It is to this end that one suffers with acceptance; it is to this end that one acts; it is to this end that one prays." [8] To become what one genuinely is, i.e., nothing, is to undergo the process by which one's self is eaten and digested by God. If we eat God's flesh in the celebration of the Mass, Well maintains, it is only so that God can in turn eat the "carnal part" of our souls and personalities, devour that within us which is under the domination of the ego. Our voracious and exploitative desire to eat others meets its match in God's hunger to eat us. At the h eight of prayer and mystical experience, the God who has let us feast on his body in the eucharist returns to devour, decreate, and transform, not so much our bodies as those portions of our personality which are structured and informed by a fundamental egotism, the obstinate belief that my self is real, substantial, and that it is the center of the universe. Eating is violent rending, and only an act of salutary violence, Weil believes, can liberate us from the inveterate tendency to privilege our own ego and its cravings over all other values. Being eaten by God dispels the illusion of autonomous subjectivity and disarms our cannibalistic drive to consume and exploit others for the benefit of a non-existent self.

Yet yielding the self up to be eaten by God is not, for Weil, the final stage. It is now, after we have become God's food, that the ethical can genuinely come into play. Weil asserts that the effect of having been eaten once by God is precisely that we are empowered (and required) to make ourselves available again to serve as food to our fellow human beings.

Multiple passages in Well's writings explore the ideal of selfless service to others through the metaphor of giving oneself to be eaten by others. In the notebook she kept during her months of exile in New York, Weil inventories the positive attributes of her body, mind, and personality, and then writes: "May all these things be torn from me, devoured by God, and given to eat to afflicted people [a des malheureux] whose bodies and souls lack all kinds of food.... Father, bring about this transformation now, in the name of Christ" (CS, 205). Moreover, the "metaphor" of giving oneself to be eaten, to nourish the bodies of those who are destitute is, for Weil, considerably more than a mere rhetorical figure. Weil's theories about the transfer of energy through work, paradigmatically the agricultural work associated with the production of food, allowed Weil to draw the conclusion that through certain types of physical labor, the substance of the worker's body quite literally passed into the products of her work (grain or other foodstuffs), and from there into the bodies of the hungry. So that in a real sense, the afflicted beings to whom the food was distributed would consume the toiling, suffering flesh of those whose labor had produced the food. Well discerned in these chemical, physical processes the same principle of sacramental transformation that lay at the core of Christianity, in the eucharistic transubstantiation of bread and wine into God's body and blood. Under these circumstances, work itself could take on a sacramental, transforming character, when it was performed with the intention of fulfilling the vital needs of one's fellow human beings.

Weil hoped that a proper understanding of this principle would radically alter people's sense of the dignity and significance of physical labor, especially the exhausting and often thankless toil accomplished by peasants and farm workers. To peasants, Weil argued, one should "explain that work literally burns away the flesh, and that thus in a sense their own flesh is transformed into [the bread they produce]. Consecration makes this bread into the flesh of Christ. They eat it, and by digestion the flesh of Christ becomes their flesh again. The cycle is complete. We should ask," Well continues, "that we be transported into Christ and Christ into us. Ask that God make our flesh into the flesh of Christ so we will be edible for all the afflicted" (CS, 228). In a related passage, Weil notes: "If the work of tilling the soil makes me get thinner, my flesh really turns into grain. If this grain serves for the communion host, my flesh becomes the flesh of Christ. Whoever tills the soil with this intention must bec ome a saint" (CS, 41-42).

While agricultural labor that actually results in the production of food remains the case where this economy of sacramental transformation is most apparent, Weil's understanding of the sacramental nature of work allows a larger, more embracing vision in which other types of non-agricultural work as well can be understood as nonetheless contributing to the physical sustenance of the afflicted through the physical self-expenditure of the workers. Other forms of toil, then, can also be situated within this positively cannibalistic economy in which the substance of one body, expended as energy in work, passes over into other human selves and is incorporated by them. Clearly, of course, even given her complex theories about energy transfers, we will no doubt want to understand Weil's notion of "becoming comestible for the afflicted" as metaphorical to the extent that what Well has in mind is not a direct, physical rending, mastication, and absorption of one human body by another. Yet the literally cannibalistic s ense of "becoming edible" is never far from Weil's mind. In a telegraphic and slightly disjointed, but thematically pivotal, notebook entry, she writes: "If a tribe of herders imagines that their animals let themselves be killed to nourish the people, could there be a purer model of devotion? This is exactly what Christ did for spiritual food.... Human sacrifices, if they were really consented to by the victim, were a pure and exalting example for the whole people.... Sacrifice [is] that which renders sacred, that which makes holiness [la saintete]. Only the victim's consent can make of sacrifice a truly sacred thing and thus genuinely purifying, a sacrament. This is the case in the Mass.... We should find out if among cannibal tribes there are traditions concerning men who offered themselves freely as food" [9] (C3, 189-90). Consented self-sacrifice, offering oneself freely as food, is the paradigm of saintly action. And only a willingness to engage in such action, to nourish others from one's own substance and if necessary at the cost of one's life, can enable the space of an ethics to open up within the anthropophagic social universe (which is the only one we can know).

Ethics in Weil's sense, then, begins when we refuse to eat people, and instead offer ourselves to be eaten by them. Thus, a fundamental and irreducible asymmetry marks Simone Weil's construction of the space of ethics. For Well, the ethical "playing field" is not and cannot be level. The other is the being I must not eat (though it is indeed my nature to hunger for his substance). Instead, she is the being to whom I must give myself as food. I must give radically, and with no expectation of reciprocity, no more hope of a return on my magnanimous gesture than a piece of bread hopes for a "return" from the person who chews and swallows it.

This renunciatory posture -- the refusal to devour the other and the determination to feed her -- is, in Well's view, the strictest, the most painful, and the most necessary form of asceticism. The process begins with a negation. I deny my cannibalistic urges. I refuse to consume the other. This basic mode of self-denial is a necessary first step. And let's be clear that for Well it is a difficult step, by no means an effortless one. We are cannibals by nature and by cultural training, and the reining in of our basic drive to destroy and consume the other is an act which implies violence against ourselves, a strict and painful disciplining of our instincts, as well as the un-learning of most of what our civilization has taught us. Nothing could be less "natural" than for us to renounce cruelty, to give up the opportunity to impose our desires on others by violence. (On this point, Nietzsche, a philosopher Simone Weil mistrusted, would have seconded her.)

This deeply unnatural renunciatory stance -- which Weil describes as the decision to "look at" an object (or person), rather than attempting to "eat" it (her) -- is the first stage of the moral life. It is also the heart of genuine aesthetic experience, which begins precisely when we accept that we cannot "eat" the beautiful, cannot take it by violence into our own being. The connection between ethics and aesthetics is not fortuitous. For Well, true moral feeling and moral action are not separable from the love of beauty; each is the training ground for the other. Among the right uses of art and beauty is precisely that they teach us this attitude of stillness, of renunciation, of restraint. They train us not to devour instantly that to which we feel ourselves drawn, that whose essence we yearn to possess or at the very least to "know."

Yet Well is not content with a stance that simply avoids doing harm, that simply contemplates. The next step is the decisive one: the move to feed the other with our own substance. Refusing to eat the other, we give ourselves up as food. We sacrifice our flesh and blood for the other's good. It is here, of course, that the asymmetry of Weil's approach takes a turn many will see as ideological and/or pathological, while the subsequent celebratory appropriation of Well's self-expenditure by comfortable male writers like me appears in a sinister light.

Too often and for too long, no doubt, followers of the biblical religions have listened to pious stories of women who denied themselves food and expended their substance in the service of others (children, men). One might feel that here again, on this very page, such a sacrifice is solemnly approved -- reenacted -- by yet another male writer who, himself well nourished and running no risks, holds up as a moral example the life of a woman who practiced brutal bodily austerities that contributed to her premature death. Writing cannibalistically, I eat Simone Weil, chew her tormented flesh and the substance of her suffering, in order to share this (tainted?) food with others.

I can't and do not want to defend myself against such a charge, seeking to liquidate it with skillfully managed arguments. The suspicion this charge expresses strikes and wounds my project with a wound that will not heal, that leaves what I write permanently scarred. Yet to focus on the ugliness of this wound, to feel and acknowledge it, is a way for us to remain conscious of the violence that is always tied to our writing and reading about God (and those who have hungered for him). The ache of this wound may keep us from closing our eyes to the social force-fields and gradients of gendered power that propelled Simone Weil to her asceticism and lonely death, and that allow me to praise her intransigence at a safe remove. Surely, writers (especially men) must check ourselves and tremble as we reach greedily to consume Weil's ostensible sacrifice. Weil's death by self-starvation in a British sanatorium was not a heroic sacrifice, nor was it a mystical sacrament. It was a tragic, useless mistake, conditioned by social forces of sexism and ethnic and religious hatred whose murderous power still operates, and in whose mechanisms we are still implicated. The tireless analysis and critique of such forces is part of the task Weil herself took on with a determination that rarely faltered. She enjoins the same task on us.

But Simone Weil's meaning is not limited to her death. And Weil was much more than a victim of oppressive social forces. Weil was no helpless sacrificial lamb; she was an activist, for whom philosophical convictions and religious feelings were real and meaningful only to the degree that they "pass[ed] into the muscles and c[a]me out in actions" (E, 251). It is by resolute action that cannibalistic, dehumanizing power must be opposed. Not Weil's death, but her life should be our focus: a life joining prayer, critical thought, and tireless bodily labor--for all of which Weil used the metaphor of feeding. Weil urged her readers to feed on her words, and to evaluate their worth on purely pragmatic criteria, by the effective nourishment -- the energy for action -- these words delivered or failed to. [10] Can we nourish ourselves on Weil's words, without feeding perversely off her death? Can her life and writing give us energy to struggle against the forms of injustice that (with her partial complicity) sealed her doom? The question -- the wound--remains open.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, what are we to do with Simone Well: her savage, hungry God, her lust for self-sacrifice, her too-eager (often male) hagiographers? Weil's theology, as Caroline Walker Bynum has suggested obliquely, must today seem anachronistic and improbable: a view of the world, the self, and God more at home in a thirteenth-century beguinage than in progressive religious circles at the dawn of the new millennium. Haven't the genuine spiritual advances of the last few centuries involved a progressive liberation from the superstitious terror and brutality-by-imitation a ravenous, lupine God inspires and authorizes? Shouldn't women in particular be suspicious of the renunciation of autonomy, the full-scale self-surrender on the part of the human (feminine) subject evoked in Weil's account of mystical devouring and decreation?

The answer to these questions must surely be yes. Simone Weil should, must be regarded with suspicion and fully engaged critical faculties. Like other messengers whose trustworthiness is uncertain (the Bible, for example). Simone Weil should and fortunately does inspire discomfort and wariness. But wariness is not blank rejection. A hermeneutic of suspicion implies not the refusal to read, but the determination to read carefully, critically, to judge claims by their ability to bring about genuine, robust, demonstrable liberation in the lives of human individuals and communities. Simone Weil, for whom truth was the highest value, would never have wanted to be read any other way.

Weil's violent, hungry God -- or Arjuna's, the million-mouthed ogre of the Bhagavad Gita -- may be the true God. This is the hypothesis that terrifies, sickens, and inspires me. As I believe it terrified and inspired Simone Weil.

Weil's theology has the virtue of taking God's violence seriously, facing it squarely. Weil is able to examine such violence without veering either toward hysterical denial or nihilistic despair. To contemplate stubbornly those aspects of God and the world which seem most terrifying and contradictory, to stay with those sides of reality that correspond least well to the God and the cosmos we would invent for ourselves if our imagination were given free rein to fashion a universe according to our whim: this was Weil's principle.

Well's thought thus presents advantages with respect to certain theologies generated recently in feminist and progressive circles. Progressive theo/thealogians have evacuated the topic of divine violence too hastily (I hasten to stress that most of my own theological work falls under this indictment). Recent discussions have sometimes seemed to imply that by changing our theological vocabulary, rejecting patriarchal images, gendered language, and those aspects of traditional scripture and theology that glorify masculine violence, we will do away with divine violence itself. This view is too optimistic. Simone Weil was conscious of the temptations of such verbal magic, in the political and in the theological arena. She was determined to resist these temptations and to assist others in doing so. Weil's use of eating images to describe the violence of God and our relation to it offers a framework for facing up to violent aspects of the divine life vividly present in the texts of the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita (and in the world of our daily experience), yet absent from much contemporary progressive God/dess-talk. It may be that Well's language can help us grapple effectively with the fact -- so shatteringly unveiled to Arjuna -- that the revelation of God's true nature is as likely to appall as it is to comfort his creatures.

But are legitimate doubts about the incantatory powers of our own theological speech a sufficient reason to trust Simone Well (and her parasitic exegetes)?

Let's be clear. Simone Weil may have been mad. She was certainly violent. Her words seduce; they are beautiful and frightening. Even dead, she fascinates. Even dead, she remains dangerous.

Substitute "God" for "Weil," the preceding statements are still rigorously accurate.

Perhaps these parallels signify that Weil can be trusted to deliver certain necessary truths, truths with an aftertaste of ashes. Weil, like God, steals from us our torpid dreams of security, our hopes for privileged treatment from the universe. Such a robbery may be an act of love. But that, of course, is the excuse history's great criminals have always proffered. Together, Weil and the God who consumed her make clear the inextricable entanglement of theft and gift in our relations with all that feeds us. [11]

Alec Irwin is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Amherst College and a Research Associate of the Institute for Health and Social Justice (Boston). With other members of the IHSJ, he coedited Dying for Growth: Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor (Common Courage Press, 2000). His study of the politics of mysticism in Simone Weil and Georges Bataille will be published by the University of Minnesota Press next spring.

Notes

(1.) Bhagavad Gita, trans. Barbara Stoller Miller (New York: Bantam, 1986), 102-3. Hereafter cited in the text as Gita.

(2.) Simone Weil, Oeuvres completes VI.2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 440. Weil's Oeuvres completes will be cited in the text as OC. Translations from French sources are my own.

(3.) Throughout this text, I use masculine pronouns to refer to God. This choice reflects both Simone Weil's characteristic usage and Catherine Madsen's suggestion that traditional masculine language forces a continued engagement with uncomfortable, "incorrect" aspects of scripture and tradition.

(4.) Simone Weil, Attente de Dieu (Paris: Fayard, 1966), 156. Cited in the text as AD.

(5.) Simone Weil, L'Enracinement (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 368. Cited in the text as E.

(6.) Simone Weil, La Connaissance surnaturelle (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), 249-50. Cited in the text as CS.

(7.) Quoted in Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 156. Bynum's volume will be cited in the text as HF.

(8.) Simone Weil, Cahiers, Tome 2 (Paris: Plon, 1953), 232.

(9.) Simone Weil, Cahiers, Tome 3 (Paris: Plon, 1956), 189-90.

(10.) Simone Weil, letter to Maurice Schumann, in Ecrits de Londres et dernieres lettres (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), 201-2.

(11.) I am grateful to Catherine Madsen for her substantive suggestions regarding the conclusion of this essay.