Faith without religion
by Joe Palmer
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It is well said, in every sense, that a man's religion is the chief fact with regard to him... By religion I do not mean here the church-creed which he professes... but the thing a man does practically believe; the thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious Universe, and his duty and destiny there... that is his religion. - Thomas Carlyle
Simone Weil wanted to be like the giraffe in the cartoon with its head above the rain clouds, saying "Nevertheless, it's nice up here," so she went into the storm of life and looked and saw, and worked and wrote about waiting for a voice from above the tempest.
Simone Weil (1909-43) did not believe, like most of the contemporary philosophers, that every person has a new world of his own to make for himself. If God was dead, as so many had claimed and which current events seemed to prove true, they surmised that it was up to each individual to achieve a decent, harmonious world to live in. On the other hand, Simone Weil, disgusted with the Fascists and Communists, gave up on her quest for a happy, congenial world. Highly idealistic, she knew Trotsky personally, she had fought on the Republican side in Spain, served in the Résistance, and suffered under Vichy, but nothing made her situation better. She found that the physical world is evil. It is up to us to live and die with that fact.
To Simone the moral sense was unnatural, not found in the real world of necessity, suffering, and death. Nature goes on its way, including us without listening to us, according to a divine order that science discovers for us. However, God does not disturb the natural order. Prayer will not stop a tsunami. We go on stumbling stupidly.
Unlike other philosophers of her era, she resembles Jacques Maritain in her quest for faith and grace. She would have resembled Soren Kierkegaard more had her faith resulted in a happy transcendence, but she died like a Cathar, a parfait, wise and blessed, waiting for God.
Francis Bacon, the father of all scientists, had this to say about faith:
Doth any man doubt that if there were taken out of men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves?
We may hope that grace, a gift from God, will make us happy. Grace may take the form of beauty and elegance, or grace may deliver the grotesque and coarse, the intelligent or stupid, good luck or bad luck. We cannot choose. We can only believe that a shattered leg or a shattered mind is best for us. Personally, I know that my sloth, ignorance, and blindness are all mine through the sufficient grace of God. The least of us, the most wretched and miserable, is as close to God as the most powerful and happy.
Good deeds do not help us. Criminality does not hinder us. Our hand of grace is dealt to us whether we like it or not, and in the long run it does not make any difference how we play it. To be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent is unnecessary, and we do not have to do good deeds or be prepared. Duty and progress are silly illusions. Whatever we do, we have to live with ourselves.
Simone Weil refused to accept baptism into the Roman Catholic Church. She gave her reasons for refusing in a long letter to a priest while she was exiled in New York in 1942 during the war against fascism. Simone loved the catechism, the liturgy, the mass, and the mystics, but for her the Church was not catholic enough.
Simone felt that the Church was too caught up in worldly, political matters to give her answers to her questions, and too negligent of the old, original, and universal myths of God. She knew that words and rituals serve to express what people know instinctively – that spiritual experience is natural and necessary. However, she also understood that the Church, with its fallible and selfish leaders, had neglected all spirituality that did not suit its earthly purposes. She thought that the Church worships itself, and the Jews worship themselves, to the exclusion of everyone else, ignoring the broad base of spirituality present in all people at all time.
The spiritual world is real and present to all people and it has been so in all cultures. So, "it is...useless to send out missions to prevail upon the peoples of Asia, Africa or Oceania to enter the Church," she wrote in Letter to a Priest, because those poor, benighted, ignorant peoples are perhaps already more spiritually enlightened than Catholics.
She was able, with the help of her superlative teachers who read the classics in the original languages, to get at the core of the ancient spiritual tradition. From her reading of the Greek classics with the philosopher Emile Chartier (aka Alain, 1868-1951) and the Indian classics with René Daumal (1908-44), the spiritualist poet and Gurdjieff's disciple, she learned that "it is not up to us to believe in God, but only not to grant our love to false gods."
Simone knew Catholicism well. She had spent Holy Week in a Benedictine monastery where she savored Gregorian chant and the metaphysical poetry she learned from an English Catholic friend. She had visited St Francis' shrine at Santa Maria degli Angeli to feel the physical representation of sanctity. A connoisseur of religious art, she had had several mystical experiences before she refused baptism:
The passion of Christ entered into my being once and for all... I felt in the midst of my suffering the presence of a love, like... the smile on a beloved face.
Like TS Eliot, her contemporary, the brilliant, royalist, bigoted, snooty banker who chose to become a Catholic, she longed for the vanished certainty of religious conviction. She wanted the Church to represent God on earth, but for her the Church was idolatrous in worshiping itself, like Judaism. Long before liberation theology became a fad among young priests, she was, similarly, a revolutionary anti-fascist, going to the war in Spain and helping the Republicans, working on the assembly line in a Renault factory, living as a field hand picking grapes, looking for a human solution to the problems of society until the inhumanity of the Nazis and the Soviets drove her mad.
I recall a young priest in Ann Arbor, in the Sixties, using a roasted chicken as the Host, tearing it apart with his hands and giving bites to the worshipers. That was long before Josef Ratzinger (1927-), 'The Vatican's Enforcer', came to power as Pope Benedict XVI (2005-). I doubt whether it could happen now.
During Simone's years of bitter disappointment with politics and the plight of the working poor, with fascism and racial discrimination, she turned inward to find the source of the moral sense that would justify suffering and degradation. Having known since girlhood that faith is inherent in all people at all times, she was attracted to the most artfully developed religion around her, but in the Roman Catholic Church she found too much religion and not enough faith. When religions are mixed with politics the result is banality and distraction from faith. The Church misses the point of grace. You cannot get grace by being a good person. It comes to you or it doesn't come, and there is nothing you can do about it.
Simone also knew that one may slip out of time through prayer, meditation, hard work, and through the performance of ritual and artful acts, and that by doing so one may slip into a state of mind that is not of this physical world, into mindlessness, an escape for a while from the awareness of living and dying. These mental and physical acts are intentional little deaths, sidesteps from the passage of time, and the avoidance of life and death's onrush. To die is to leave time in order to go back out to another dimension. Prayer and meditation serve the same end for a while.
Simone did everything she could to induce God's grace, even though she knew that nothing one does to seek God would work. Like a Pentecostal or Charismatic, one who seeks direct spiritual experience, Simone sought grace in foreign languages, frequently praying by reciting the Lord's Prayer in classical Greek. Her conversion to God's love came when she first read George Herbert's metaphysical poem 'Love' in English, but she did not share her ecstasy with groups of rapturous co-religionists. She shared her visions of godliness and grace only with individual readers of her exalted and critical essays on her spiritual experience.
The problem with grace is the old "bad things happen to good people" problem. Grace may be a lightning bolt in the top of your head, and the lightning bolt may be a kindness and a blessing. You cannot know.
Religion and politics were too human, too full of faults for her to support. Politics leads to fascist inhumanity, to Nazis and Soviets. Organized religion leads to institutionalized madness, to churches and cults. Simone's recourse was to withdraw into mysticism, into spiritualism and faith.
Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace.
Simone's brother André (1906-98), the renowned mathematician, wrote of her rationalizing her faith in God and the gods of all time:
She presented me with her arguments for and against becoming a Catholic, and I told her, Basically your arguments would be the same if you were talking about converting to Hinduism, Islam, or Buddhism, and so on...
- Yet, that's what I think, she replied.
In practice mystics belonging to nearly all the religious traditions coincide to the extent that they can hardly be distinguished [one from the other]. They represent the truth of each of these traditions. - Letter to a Priest
Simone's Platonism: The fact that we can speak of gods, saints, and spirits, and have always done so, means that they are inside and outside us but not in nature. Similarly, the fact that we can speak of geometric forms is proof of their existence in another dimension separate from our physical dimension, but not in nature. Where do perfect circles, lines, and points live but with the hypotenuse and Hyperion? The existence of Platonic abstractions like love, beauty, p, justice, E= mc², Euclid's postulates, other geometries, and the Pantheon of gods in our minds must mirror a higher reality.
Any number of accounts drawn from mythology and folklore could be translated into Christian truths without forcing or deforming anything in them, but rather on the contrary, thus throwing vivid light upon them, and their truths, would in their turn, thereby take on a new clarity.
The old Greek religion was a prefiguring of the Christian religion and a recognition of the gods, from the spirits of the household to the denizens of Olympia, a common, shared, benevolent, public schizophrenia that allowed the recognition of imaginary gods for blame and praise, perhaps a consequence of the bicameral [split] brain. Like my dog eating my homework, the gods were always there to take the blame, and they intervened like humans to assist in the solution of problems and the avoidance of bad luck. The Greeks had gods instead of psychology. We have the same gods, spirits, angels, and demons to accompany us on our journey through life, but the names have changed.
There was no official, organized religion among the Greeks. Mere religiosity happened only at the local level, each community doing its own thing. In their tradition there was no dogma, no apostasy, no heresy, and therefore no theology nor schismatics raising the devil. They did not kill each other for worshiping the wrong god.
The traditional gods were out there in the imagination with general concepts to be worshiped, like Honor, Vengeance, Chance, Hope, Necessity, and Deliverance: soteria, 'Salvation'.
Crossroads, groves, and promontories had guardian spirits that were honored with altars, shrines, and temples. Compare the Christian crosses put up where violent death has occurred, as in Auschwitz and Normandy, and at every crossroads in Mexico.
The Greeks gave sacrifices, burnt offerings, in front of, not inside, the temples, the sanctuaries of the gods. There they offered fruit and grain, and often animals, burning the skin and bones, and then taking the meat home for supper. Perhaps the local temple became the butcher shop, the abattoir. Perhaps churches were once slaughterhouses and restaurants.
In ancient Greece the temples where sacrifices were made contained votive offerings, gifts to the gods in fulfillment of promises and vows. At one time we made human sacrifices there; today we burn candles and leave money, or we attend pep-rallies for feel-good therapy.
Among the ancients, the line between allegory and empire, fantasy and fact, delusion and physical reality had not been so strongly drawn as it has among some people today. They assumed that whatever happens, every cause, happens for a purpose, even though they did not always know what the purpose was. They thought we must be here for some reason.
The Ancient Greek religion was not essentially different from the pantheistic religion of the Hindus. Only the names are changed. The Hindus and the Greeks shared a common language as one people before they split apart, a language we now call Indo-European. A few thousand years ago, they moved apart and mixed with others, as did other similar Indo-European peoples - the Celts, Iranians, Germans, Latinians, and Slavs. Their languages and religions diverged and naturally changed on the surface, but not essentially. They continued to keep a common vocabulary and grammar, and to recognize the sameness of our human endeavors and experience. For example, Hindi, one of the official languages of India, and Farsi, the language of Persia, are not very different from English today. It takes some learning either way, but it is not so hard as if one were trying to become knowing in Chinese. And if we look at the old words in Greek and Sanskrit, we find they are the similar. Of course, there are temporal varieties – Sanskrit becoming Hindi and Urdu somewhat as Latin "became" Italian, French, Spanish, and Romanian. Essentially, the Indo-European languages we find from India to Europe are similar, like cousins.
In Judaism, Adonai is little more than King Kong destroying apostates [Deuteronomy 12: 1-3], a far cry from a God who is immanent in nature and full of humane values, a god we are happy with. And the human God, Jesus Christ, is one of a Trinity, who with the saints goes marchin' in. Throughout Christian mythology there are saints, sinners, spirits, and angels all over the place just as in Hinduism and Greek mythology.
Most Indians practice one or more of the many forms of Hinduism. Shiva, the destroyer, Vishnu, the preserver, and Brahma, the creator, are a triad or trinity central to Hinduism. A multitude of sects celebrate the gods without a fixed set of sacred texts. Complex Brahman philosophy leads to simplified beliefs such as Buddhism and Jainism without denying animism and the spirits of traditional mythologies.
Ancient Greek religion is wrapped up in Greek mythology, a contradictory and complex set of beliefs about the other world of imagination. The Greeks collected myths from all over their world, from Asia and Egypt. They mixed their animistic gods with heroes in legends. Father Zeus' Olympian gods and those who lived in Hades could take the blame for anything. Ethical and moral teachings came from the Dionysian mysteries, such as the miracle of vegetation and rebirth, and from oracles, such as the Sibyl at Delphi who with Apollo's consent gave the earth mother Gaea's answers to questions. The Sibyl was a shaman from long ago, and accepted by the Catholic Church.
How our life would be changed if we could see that Greek geometry and the Christian faith have sprung from the same source!
Any abstraction like LOVE or GOD or EVIL is no more physically real than a perfect circle. There are no perfect circles on earth. They are all in your mind. The reality beyond the heavenly spheres, the harmony of the soul with the universe of Ideas occurs only to the mind of one individual at a time. Such perfection must be brought down to earth in order for us to make use of it in the form of describable, believable beings, like the Messiah.
The Christian Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, reigns with the saints, commanding a host of angels, powers, principalities, dominions, thrones, archangels seraphim, and cherubim. Malachi, the messenger of the Old Testament, the Torah, like Mercury or Hermes brings the Good News. The Roman Catholic Church claims over 10,000 saints and beatified persons noted for their sanctity and missionary ardor, the Orthodox and Oriental Churches adding many more. The Anglicans politely add only one, King Charles I (1600-1649, beheaded martyr). Satan, the most beautiful angel, Prince of Darkness, Ruler of Demons, Beelzebub, is the great administrator. Jesus is somewhat lower than the angels because he died. In order to die He had to become a human being.
A village idiot is as close to the truth as a child prodigy. - Simone Weil, "Human Personality"
Alas, O Lord, to what a state dost Thou bring to those who love Thee! - St Theresa of Avila
If Christ wasn't God he was merely pathetic, not beautiful. - Flannery O'Connor
