EGS Public Lecture, on My Weil. Transcript of my brief talk follows.

In Plato’s Laws, the Athenian stranger claims that there are two arguments in particular that foster the belief in the gods – the antiquity and divinity of the soul and the order of the heavens under the control of reason. No one who has contemplated the heavenly bodies carefully could suppose that celestial events happen randomly. And no one can govern the polis, the city, who does not understand that the stars are steered by a divine will and exist in harmony with customs and law [nomos].

Susan Taubes observes that this idea of an ultimate harmony between human and cosmic nature runs from Plato to the Stoics: the conviction that human beings are at home in the universe. This cosmic ‘optimism’, as she calls it, can reassure the Stoics even amidst complete disillusionment within the political sphere. If the polis, the city, doesn’t provide the laws we want, then we should muse upon the law-governed cosmos instead – we should become cosmopolitan, citizens of the larger Whole. Stoic contemplation provides the reassurance that the order of the soul mirrors the order of the cosmos.

But what happens when this contemplation reveals neither the order of the soul nor the order of the heavens? What happens with the awareness that the disarray of the universe mirrors the disarray of the soul and it is no longer possible to harmonize the affairs of state according to a nomos that encompasses heaven and earth? The polis is cast adrift; our condition becomes what we can call disastrous, remembering the etymology of this word, since the stars, astres, have fallen.

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Late Antiquity saw the arising of a movement of thought radically antipathetic to Stoicism, for which the sense of a cosmos as meaningful whole has collapsed. There was no longer a meaning-making connection between human beings and the world. What is called Gnosticism rejects the notion of cosmic order, considering the world in which we live to be evil, fallen and meaningless. Whilst there is such a thing as radically transcendent divine meaning, it remains utterly alien or the hidden – accessible only in a gnosis available to the elect. Gnosticism posits an absolute dualism: on the one hand, our world, which is at the sway of evil and irrational forces and ruled by the sham god called the demiurge and on the other, the transcendent realm of the true, inaccessible creator-God.

Gnosticism, some argue, is a fantasy of late nineteenth and twentieth century historians of religion. But the life of this fantasy is interesting. For Jacob Taubes, ancient Gnosticism was the template of all revolutionary critique, offering a critique of existence as such, manifesting itself in the desire to negate, abolish or limit the effects of the worldly order. Gnosticism is antinomian, rejecting all laws, including the law of the cosmos. Such antinomianism is lived as an active revolt, as an attempt to live against the world.

What form does that revolt take? It could be religious apostasy, or deliberately immoral behaviour, thwarting the social mores of a time. We might also think of Paul’s advice to the Corinthians to live worldly relations and actions ‘as though not’ (hōs mē): ‘From now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no possessions …’

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The characters of my novel, My Weil, PhD students in Disaster Studies practice a gnostic rebellion against the world in a number of ways – drinking, drugging, doomery, truancy, contempt towards all institutions. I say gnostic and not nihilistic, because they hold on to a version of transcendence as it is able to give a minimal meaning to their lives, even if it is only as the spur to oppose the legitimacy of the world. (Of course this view is consistent with what Scholem calls religious nihilism.) Such transcendence is linked, in their imagination, with apocalypse which, if it does not redeem the evil of the world, can at least destroy it. (Scholem: ‘nihilism arises from the rejection of reality because this reality [ … ] is only worth of being destroyed.’) One of my characters, Marcie, has a vision of the Antichrist, of the demiurge, who will be the false messiah of the coming end-times. But her vision also awakens her faith in the true Messiah, who will actually destroy the world and lead the way to a new creation.

Into their midst arrives my version of French philosopher Simone Weil. She, like them, is a PhD student in Disaster Studies, an opportunistic rebranding of Continental Philosophy at a lower-league table university. She, like them, is disturbed by the the absence of justice, mercy and goodness in the world. But she, unlike them, sees this absence dialectically, as precisely a sign of divine justice, mercy and goodness.

This emphasis on dialectics was, of course, present in the real Simone Weil. And it’s what make her work seem close to Gnosticism. Indeed, Susan Taubes drew Weil’s thought into conversation with the notion of Gnosticism developed in modernist Jewish philosophy, writing her PhD dissertation on the topic and publishing a well-known article called ‘The Absent God’, in which she develops the idea of a ‘religious atheism’ – of a ‘religious experience of the death of God’.

This is a conversation I try to further in my novel, bringing my gnostically-inclined characters into the orbit of my Simone Weil. They quiz her about the silence of God, about her direct action charity work, about contradictions and why we should contemplate them, about decreation and madness. My Simone claims that the crucifixion has never been deeper than today, with general indifference to God, a denial of the interest or significance of the crucifixion. ‘It’s only now that Jesus is being put to death in the fullest and most radical sense’, my Simone say. Only now, that is, that the illusions of belief can be burnt away, and faith must pass through atheism as through a purifying flame.

This is a fascinating thought for Johnny in particular, the narrator and protagonist of my novel, whose initials add up to Job. My Job is the strongly affected by the suffering and violence he sees around him, as well as his own fear of madness. My Simone shows him how he might transmute his torment at the affliction of others. God might be powerless in the created order, but my Simone shows Johnny how, in the example of her charity work, it is possible to act for God. Compassion, properly acted upon, is God’s work in us, creating the meaning that painfully lacking in our lives.

Simone appears to be able to provide Johnny with the true gnosis sought by the Gnostic – the knowledge of God which can give meaning to the world. But this isn’t quite it. Because it’s not actually about knowledge at all. What’s needed is to maximize the dialectical power of the contradiction between God and the world, between good and evil, between the supernatural and the natural, between the eternal and the temporal – and to experience them in their harmony. It’s to deepen the distance between these terms, to plunge yet deeper into evil and finitude and suffering and loss in order to summon their opposite. A task that must appear mad, but whose madness is the correlate of the madness of God in creating the world.

But Simone Weil, in reality or in my novel, is no Gnostic. Where there was dualism, she wants to see ratio. Where true God and cosmos were set apart, she wants to understand the relation between them, the correlation of contraries. Where there is my character’s alternation between nihilistic churn and rushing apocalyptic ecstasy, there is Simone’s advocacy of contemplating contradiction – of what would, for her, reveal the dialectical unity or harmony of God and world, good and evil, supernatural and natural, and so on, thereby overcoming Gnostic dualism.

Who wins? Can Simone Weil really hold back the disaster? Is the harmony she seeks really possible? Does dialectics work? Can you really pull God out of the hat of Gnosticism, deeply felt?