The Virtues of Waiting

Simone Weil wrote in The Need for Roots in 1943: “Need is not a legitimate bond between Man and God. . . . God gives Himself to Man gratuitously, and by way of additions, but Man should not desire to receive.” (Weil, 1987). However, she also observed “it is desire that saves.” (BW, 324) It is the concept of waiting that allows the contradiction to be resolved. “Man should not desire to receive” means that God will give himself . . . maybe. God has the initiative. “My business is to wait in the void.”

How can the only authentic desire for God be a “waiting in the void” that will not fill that void up with a God that I happen to need? Is there some preparation, say, in education, in the formation of the human being, by the most elevated exercise of attention?

Waiting and Attention

In a letter to Maurice Schumann, Simone Weil expressed her vocation this way: “For me personally, life hasn’t any sense, and, fundamentally, I have never had any other sense of life than that of waiting on the truth. (Weil, 1980, 213) Note that she wrote: “waiting on the truth,” and not “waiting on God,” although from waiting on truth to waiting on God is a threshold she crossed often “without changing direction.” Waiting is a form of genuine attention, and very early on, Simone Weil was persuaded that “attention is the only faculty of the soul that gives access to God.” (BW, 221)

Whether it is waiting on God or waiting on the truth, it is true that, in all ways, “waiting is the foundation of the spiritual life.” (Weil, 2006, 126). It is the foundation, for “there is no entry into the transcendent until the human faculties . . . have come up against a limit, and the human being waits at this threshold, which he can make no move to cross,” setting himself “to wait.” (Weil, 2006, 362) This waiting responds to God’s waiting. God patiently waits for us to love him.

Putting “waiting on God” in the front of our minds, as Simone Weil does, lets us understand why, for a philosopher who is so often defined as being mystical, spiritual, and Christian, she never posed the question of God to herself. “Seeking God,” as “seeking the truth” is “a false expression.” According to a formulation that is identical to the one by which she defined the wrong way of thinking about attention, Simone Weil considered that “the metaphor of seeking God evokes efforts of the muscular will.” (BW, 339). For, the search for God cannot be a matter of work, since “the most precious goods are not to be looked for, but waited for. For man cannot find them by his own efforts” (BW, 230). One understands, then, given these conditions, how she could write: “The stance that brings about salvation does not resemble any activity. The Greek word that expresses it is ὑπομενή. . . . It is attending, the attentive and faithful motionlessness that lasts indefinitely and that no blow can shake.” (BW, 340) 

Thanks to the detour by the way of prayer – which is “the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable” (BW, 225) – one sees that attention is the complete opposite of the tension by which one wills to be active, one wills to search. True attention waits: “. . . seeking nothing, yet being ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.” (BW, 229)

Attention is a right orientation of thought. It is, above all, to make oneself available, and that depends on us, in the same way that it depends on us “not to give our love to false gods,” but, “it does not depend on our energies to believe in God.” 

Forming a Right Orientation of Attention

Before God seizes us, the “soul loves in the void.” It can believe that there is something that responds to its love, but “but believing is not knowing. . . . The soul only knows with certainty that it is hungry. What matters is that it cries out in hunger. The important thing is that it cries out when it is hungry.” (BW, 349) We can well imagine that a child “does not stop crying out if it is suggested to him that there might not be any bread. He cries out just the same.” (Ibid.) Thus Simone Weil concludes: “The danger is not that the soul doubts whether there is bread or not, but that it persuades itself through a lie that it is not hungry. It cannot persuade itself of this except through a lie, for the reality of its hunger is not a belief, but a certainty.” (Ibid.)

At first glance, it is paradoxical that Simone Weil claims that “the eternal part of the soul is nourished by its hunger.” (Weil, 2006, 335) But hunger holds onto its emptiness, this opening that God alone can fill. And because the energy that comes from desire acts only in the moment, it is necessary never to stop crying out one’s hunger, instant after instant. The logic of waiting is opposed to the logic of satisfaction, for waiting alone can manage the void in which God will come to stay. It is appropriate to say that it is “desire that saves” but that is uniquely thanks to rightly oriented attention, which depends on us. It depends on us, but still it is necessary – since each time that it is a question of making the good descend upon earth – that the real conditions, material and social, are created for the right orientation of the attention which allows the descent of the Truth, of the Good, or of God. It is necessary that from infancy on that one be formed to deal with one’s hunger. Above all, it is necessary to not try to satisfy it with no-matter-what-kind-of-food, for once it is too easily filled the idols of nature, the satisfied soul will no longer be able to receive the truth.            

The importance that Simone Weil gives to the concept of waiting in education should be understood in the Greek or German sense of “formation” (Paideia, Bildung). The “formation of the faculty of attention is the true goal and almost sole interest of studies.” (BW, 225) It is necessary to count on the full effectiveness of school exercises in order to enhance, in the first place, the capacity for attention. However, these are only effective on the “condition that they are carried out for this end and for this end only.” (Ibid.) Even if these exercises develop an “inferior discursive attention, namely, reasoning,” if they are conducted methodically they can “prepare for the appearance of another attention in the soul, that which is the highest, the intuitive attention” (Ibid.) This higher intuition can be exercised just as well in all the labor of a free person. Lacking such attention, all labor, whether it is intellectual or material, will be, “underneath a mask of freedom, itself also servile work.” (BW, 222)

Conclusion

In conclusion, how can one help but observe that these principles of education posed by Simone Weil are ignored today? Plunged into a permanent bath of sonorous entreaties (music that invades all the spaces of life, incessantly droning on), and of “virtual reality” (computer screens or mobile telephones), how can either the child or the adult “get back to this silence which is secretly present in us?” (Weil, 2013, 396) For such a silence is prior to all receiving, not to mention all revelation – of the Truth or of God. Returning to this silence is just as much the condition for a politics exercised as an authentic art by those who govern. Without it, how could they perceive the “secret thoughts and needs of the people” (Weil, 1987, 190), which constitute the needs of the soul? The conditions of the right orientation of attention are summed up, finally, in the creation of a “collective life which, wrapping each human being warmly, also leaves around her, space and silence. Modern life is otherwise.” (Weil, 2013, 396). It is up to us to rediscover an inner space that deals with time by waiting, even as we are faced with the precipitous and accelerating changes of modern life which hold us in their thrall. 

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Sources

Weil, Simone, 1980, Écrits de Londres. Paris, Gallimard, coll. “Espoir”

 Weil, Simone,1987, The Need for Roots, translated Arthur Wills, London, Ark Paperbacks (reprinted from London, Routledge Kegan Paul, 1952)

Weil, Simone, 2006, Œuvres complètes. Paris, Gallimard. Tome VI. Vol. 4

Weil, Simone, 2013, Œuvres complètes. Paris, Gallimard. Tome V. Vol. 2

Translated by Eric O. Springsted

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