The following is an excerpt from Simone Weil's essay, "The Love of God and Affliction" taken from Simone Weil, Awaiting God [Attente de Dieu] (trans. Brad Jersak, Freshwind Press, 2012).
The grand enigma of human life is not suffering, but affliction. It is not astonishing that innocents should be killed, tortured, flushed from their countries, reduced to misery or slavery, imprisoned in camps and cells—since we know there are criminals who commit these acts. Neither is it astonishing that sickness imposes long periods of suffering that paralyze life and make it an image of death—since nature is subject to the blind play of mechanical necessity. But it is astonishing that God has given affliction the power to take hold of the very souls of innocents and to seize them as their sovereign master. In the best case, the one marked by affliction only keeps half his soul.
Those to whom one of these blows has happened—after which they struggle on the ground like a half-crushed worm—have no words to express what has happened to them. Among the people they meet, even those who have suffered much, those who have never had contact with affliction (properly defined) have no idea what it is. It is something specific, irreducible to any other thing, like sounds we cannot explain at all to a deaf-mute. And those who themselves have been mutilated by affliction are in no state to bring help to anyone at all, and nearly incapable of even desiring to help. Thus, compassion for the afflicted is an impossibility. When compassion truly produces itself, it is a miracle more astonishing than walking on water, healing the sick or even the resurrection of the dead.
Affliction constrained Christ to beg to be spared, to seek for consolations from men, to believe his Father had abandoned him. It constrained a just man to cry out against God, a just man as perfect as any human nature can be, perhaps more, if Job is less a historical person than a figure of Christ. ‘He laughs at the affliction of innocents.’ This is not a blasphemy; it is an authentic cry wrenched from anguish. The life of Job, from one end to the other, is a pure marvel of truth and authenticity. On the subject of affliction, anything that differs from this model is more or less stained with falsehood.
Affliction renders God (God seems) absent for a time, more absent than a dead man, more absent that the light in a completely dark cell. A sort of horror submerges the whole soul. During this absence there is nothing to love. What is terrible is that in this darkness when there is nothing to love, if the soul ceases to love, the absence of God becomes definitive. The soul must continue to love in the void—or at least want to love—be it even with an infinitesimal part of itself. Then one day God comes to manifest Himself to them and reveals the beauty of the world, like God did in the case of Job. But if the soul ceases to love, it falls into something here below that is nearly equivalent to hell.
This is why those who precipitate affliction on people who are not prepared to receive it are killing them. On the other hand, in an epoch like ours when affliction is suspended over all of us, bringing help to the soul is only effective to the point of preparing it for affliction. This is no small thing.
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