Décréation et attention : rapports entre Dieu et l'homme chez Simone Weil
(2010)
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Details
- Authors
- Supervisors
- Dupuis, Michel
- Abstract
- (en) “De-creation” and attention are the framework of the relationship between God and the human being. With the notion of “de-creation”, Simone Weil gives us her understanding of the existence of the human being which contains the prerequisite of transcendence in a twofold orientation. On one hand there is the self-knowledge and the self-surpassing for more meaning and on the other the quest for union with the Supreme Being who alone can guarantee him the fullness of being. The human being has received his existence as a gift which is also a sign of God’s love for him. He is a creature to whom God has turned his attention. In fact he did not exist but the Creator gave him the opportunity of being. This attention to him is understood by Simone Weil as the God’s self-will of renunciation to his power. The creation of other being is therefore a kind of renunciation to be everything. This renunciation reached the climax through the self-emptying of Christ in his death on the cross. “De-creation” is God’s motion in favour of the human being that in turn measures how God loves him and appreciating its value cannot be indifferent to the elevated attention. The human being realizes therefore that he has to journey in the opposite direction and travel the same distance God did between himself and the human being. Simon Weil asked herself if this journey is possible and found that because the human being does not know to walk up vertically, he has to walk down, which means to do his own “de-creation”. The “de-creation” of human being consists in overcoming in him all that keeps him from rising to God. In fact, there is in him the up and the down, the good and the evil: all that is heaviness in him which pulls him down. The great heaviness he must undo is his “ego”, his autonomy. His « ego » constitutes all that opposes him to God. It is a power that he strongly exercises on the world and on the others beings, if he doesn’t moderate his strength. When he undoes his ego, he allows the grace to raise him to God. However, this rising is not the end of the “de-creation’s” process. As the prisoner of Plato’s cavern who could have freed himself and went out to contemplate the sunlight and come back in the cavern, the human being who has had a contact with God has to come back into the world in order to transform it with the God’s light he has had. The “de-created” human being doesn’t flee from the world and from others in God. This coming back is to be understood as a concrete way of loving God. The authentic contact with God is to be lived in the world. The one who has had a contact with God must show the true value of the things into the world and in the same way show the value of the other human beings if he takes them like intermediaries which reveal the love of God. When the intermediaries are purely lived, they really turn the human being to God. One may talk for instance of the supernatural use of affliction, the beauty of the Universe and the compassion of the neighbour. The human being has to use affliction in a supernatural way, that means to love God through it, because the affliction suffered in spite of himself by the necessity teaches him what he is in relation to God, i.e. he is nothing. Accepting this affliction is to be in communion with Christ’s Passion in which he has experienced the nothingness of the existence and also the compassion of his Father in the heaven. The accepted affliction helps the human being to be not a centre of resistance to God and open the way of the compassion of suffering neighbour. The beauty of the Universe puts the human being on God’s path if it is taken as the manifestation of the beauty of his Creator. The Universe’s order is a sight of the presence of God. When the human being contemplates the beauty of the Universe as a reality in which his is included, he is well disposed to awaken himself to the reality and to the eternity, and to turn his attention towards the others and God. The love or the compassion for the neighbour is the intermediary par excellence because there is identity between the love of God and the neighbour in the Gospel. The neighbour whom we must love is mainly the needy. The prototype of the needy is the one of the Gospel’s parable of the Good Samaritan. The needy is an “absent humanity” deserted on roadside. However, the human being flees naturally the affliction. The face of the neighbour who is needy paralyses and put us to flight. The only one who has been in contact with God can have a pure compassion of the poor neighbour. But his action has to be a “non efficient action”. It means that his action has to be accomplished, not with autonomous’ mind, but with a mind of perfect obedience. A real action of compassion of the needy is the one we accomplish aware of being an instrument of God. The process of human being’s “de-creation” has been sometimes understood as a pure and simple self-destruction. However, when we consider the writings of Simone Weil as a whole, we can realize that the annihilation she recommends is annihilation in God who will gift to the human being the fullness of being. This annihilation is the synonym of “going out of self” in order to be oneself with God. In connection with that, Simone Weil wrote: “De-creation as transcendent fulfilment of the creation, annihilation in God who gives to the annihilated creature the fullness of being that he is deprived of as long as he exists” (WEIL Simone, Œuvres complètes, Vol. 3 (février 1942 – juin 1942). La porte du Transcendant, Paris, Gallimard, 2002, p. 170.
- Affiliations
Citations
Gisamonyo Ntawihaye Twose, G. (2010). Décréation et attention : rapports entre Dieu et l’homme chez Simone Weil. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/130973