American Academy of Religion

Simone Weil and Feminist Spirituality Author(s): Jeffrey C. Eaton Source: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 54, No. 4 (Winter, 1986), pp. 691704 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1463923 . Accessed: 05/06/2011 10:44
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Journal of the American Academy of Religion. LIV/4

SIMONE WEIL AND FEMINIST SPIRITUALITY

JEFFREY C. EATON

I The feminist movement has discovered another world, a universe of experience that has been buried under the deep dust of partriarchy. The surfacing of this alternative universe has called into question the assumption that the experience of men is inclusive of all human experience. Indeed, no area of life or thought is untouched by the fundamental feminist insight that one's experience as male or female profoundly affects one's understanding of the world. And this is as true with respect to religion as it is with respect to any other aspect of life and culture. In recent years there has been a self-consciouseffort on the part of feminist theologians to analyze the Christian tradition in light of women's experience. The picture that has emerged as a consequence of this analysis has not been pretty. The patriarchalhierarchy of male over female was read into Christian theology in a way that ratified the domination of women by men. God was conceived as a great patriarch over against the creation, often conceived in female terms. The normative traditions in Judaism and Christianity rather consistently subordinated the female to the male. Full personhood was reserved for males; women were understood to be derivative persons, dependent upon men for their existence, essentially limited in their intellectual capacity, and spiritually suspect. The personhood of women was largely associated with their biological function in child-bearing. Female sexuality was viewed as dangerous, a source of temptation away from the life of the spirit to which men were called, and a force which needed to be carefully controlled in order to insure the legitimacy of the patriarchalkinship line. It was, of course, impossible that so misbegotten a creature as woman should be thought to be God's speaking image in the world. She was man's image, and a poor one at
Jeffery C. Eaton is Assistant Professor of Religion at Hamilton College, Clinton, New
York 13323.

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that, and so she must find her place in God's order on terms that were allotted her by men. Certainly, feminine images were not fit images in which to cast Godhead. God, after all, is pure spirit, but women are carnal creatures, endowed with very limited spiritual capacity. The male, on the other hand, is the spiritual principle in the world, distinguished as such by his ability to reason, his greater vitality, to say nothing of his predominance in nearly all aspects of life. But this sad story is not the entire story. Contemporary feminists, who have been able to see a tradition within the Bible and the Church's history that is critical of partriarchy, have labored to construct a new norm for interpreting Christian theology, a norm which takes the experience of women to be fundamental to the reappraisalof the Christianfaith. And this reconstruction of the normative tradition affects every aspect of Christian life, ecclesiology no less than the understanding of the doctrine of the First Article, spirituality no less than social ethics. Contemporary with these reconstructive efforts has been a developing interest in the thought of Simone Weil, and especially in her writings on the subject of Christian spirituality. For the most part, these two strands of inquiry have been pursued in isolation from one another. Weil's work has not been an explicit source of inspiration to feminist theologians, and feminist theology has not been an obvious resource for those who make it their business to propagate Weil's thought. It is my intention in this essay to bring these two strands together, to plait them in a way that shows the significance of certain factors in Weil's thought for the feminist reconstuction of Christian spirituality, a reconstruction which is beyond patriarchy. Simone Weil (1909-1943) was not a feminist, if by "feminist" we mean a person who is self-consciously acting to interpret human experience in light of women's experience. Her brief life was marked throughout by social and political activism, always as the partisan of the oppressed, but in the tumult of the Great Depression and the Second World War, the oppression of women was not a topic directly addressed by Weil. The issues about which she wrote were at first primarily socio-political. She criticized Marx and Marxism as a sympathetic friend of marxist intentions to transform the conditions of injustice which weighed upon the masses. Her political activism and her contemplation of the "social mechanism," particularly the way that mechanism operated with respect to the lives of members of the working class, put her in a position to conclude that force was futile as a means of human liberation, that the purification of human life of all that is oppressive requires a power that is not of this world, a power which is supernatural. So poised, Weil underwent a series of religious

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experiences that culminated in a mystical encounter with Christ. After this, her writings were devoted to understanding the relation of the world of natural gravity to the world of supernatural grace. The writings of Simone Weil do not form a system, nor were they meant to. On the contrary, Weil's method was positively anti-systematic, marked by the multiplication of paradoxes and the correlation of contradictories. If there is a system to be made of the contradictions the world throws up to us, that system is only possible on the plane of supernaturallove. It was her particular genius to expose these contradictions and to show their use as the criterion for what is real. Whatever consistency there is in her various writings is the result of her use of certain images to which she returns again and again in order to express her ideas; images such as that of eating or afflictionor necessity or gravity or attention appear in many different contexts to mark the journey of the soul in search of God. In the present context it should be pointed out that Weil invariably employs the traditional male images derived from the Church and antique Greek culture in referring to God, and she does so without apparent demur. She characteristically portrays the coming of salvation into the world in male figures. This does not seem to be simply a function of the fact that Jesus is male, as may be seen in Weil's description, drawn from the Oresteia, of the way in which God comes to those who wait attentively for God. Electra has suffered every indignity as a consequence of her father's murder and her unwillingness to make peace with his murderers. She could have been restored to a position of privilege if only she would have accommodated herself to those in power, the very ones who had murdered her father. But she would have none of it. Instead, she waited for Orestes, her brother, to return to deliver her from her awful fate. And though she does not even believe Orestes is alive, she waits for the salvation that only he can bring, preferring his absence to the presence of anyone else. This is an extremely important image in Weil's spirituality, one which she uses to describe the workings of divine grace, but note that the image is one in which the values of male dominance and female subordination, which are characteristic of patriarchy, are well-preserved. It is not just that she employs certain patriarchalimages which she inherited from the Christian tradition, but that she seems to understand the tradition in those images. Her exposition of the relationship of divine grace to the world is couched in the language of patriarchy. This was the alloy in which she minted her own spirituality, and the evidence of this is prominent in the language and imagery she uses to frame her ideas. Her description of her own mystical encounters with Christ is cast

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in nuptial images. The surrender of the soul to God which is, according to Weil, our proper vocation as creatures, is depicted in terms of a "nuptial yes" given to God, invariably construed as the Bridegroom. She says:
The effective part of the will is not effort, which is directed toward the future. It is consent; it is the 'yes' of marriage. A 'yes' union of Christ with the eternal part of the soul. (1973:220f.)

pronouncedwithin the present moment and for the present moment,but spokenas an eternalword,for it is consentto the

This passage also suggests a certain passivity which is a characteristic feature of Weil's spirituality. She calls this state one of "inactive action." It is achieved by attentively waiting for the necessity, which is the implicit presence of God's grace in the world, to take hold of one. She describes it this way:
An effort that brings a soul to salvation is like the effort of looking or of listening; it is the kind of effort by which a fiancee accepts

her lover. It is an act of attentionandconsent; whereaswhatlanguage designates as will is something suggestive of muscular difficultieswe have to surmount, however great our activity may appear to be, there is nothing analogous to muscular effort;there is only waiting, attention, silence, immobility, constant through suffering and joy. (1973:193f.)

effort.... In our acts of obedienceto Godwe are passive; what

This passivity is prescribed by Weil as the soul's response to God and should not be taken as an endorsement of docetism with respect to neighbor or natural environment. The point is simply that Weil usually portrays the relation of God to the soul in terms of the relation of an active male principle to a passive female principle; i.e., in the stereotypical terms of patriarchy. Such features of Weil's work as I have just pointed out may be taken as primafacie evidence that Weil was a victim of patriarchy and hence that her spiritual vision has little to contribute to the development of an authentic feminist spirituality in the Christian tradition. The balance of what I have to say will be devoted to showing that this would be a hasty judgment, and that, appearances to the contrary, Weil's thought transcends the structures of patriarchy and points the way toward a Christianspiritualitywhich is at last purified of the idolatry of patriarchyand the sexual-castesystem that is the product of that idolatry. First, I shall indicate three motives in her spirituality which anticipate many of the contemporary feminist criticisms of patriarchy. Then I shall proceed to discuss the promise in Weil's work for a feminist Christian spirituality that transcends the limitations of the dominant culture, a spirituality in which universality is made explicit.

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1. At one point Weil says, "A beautiful woman looking at her image in the mirror may very well believe the image is herself. An ugly woman knows it is not" (1973:16). The obvious moral to be drawn from this saying is that no one should be deluded into thinking eternity resides in contingencies of physical fact. The woman's physical beauty is a temptation for her to look no farther than the face in the mirror to discover what she is, and so to reduce "that infinite being which surveys all things, to a small space" (1972:29). The beautiful woman who is captivated by her own beauty might find herself in the position of denying that she is spiritually hungry, mistaking the finite good of her beauty for a final good, thereby hiding from herself the essential spiritual condition of creatureliness: viz., the hunger of the human heart for that which time cannot destroy. A fundamental premise of feminism is that women are not to be reduced to the status of sex-objects, that female personhood is not to be defined in male terms or construed simply according to bodily function and appearance. Sexism, the identification of gender with sex and the subsequent reduction of women to the level of instruments in the sexual hierarchy which men dominate, is, according to feminist theory, the fundamental crime against women, the form of the manifold degradations to which women have been subjected. Feminists have protested against the way in which women's image has been reflected in the mirror of patriarchalculture, have argued that women have been misled about themselves insofar as they have accepted the roles assigned to them by men. If a woman can be satisfied in these roles, she is, for all intents and purposes, lost to herself and perhaps to God as well. Applying Weil's understanding of our spiritual dilemma to this situation we can see that as long as a woman believes herself to be the image reflected by patriarchy,she will be liable to deny her hunger for a fullness the patriarchal world cannot satisfy. And by denying her hunger she will deny the possibility of its satisfaction by the One who alone is sovereign, the One whose grace is sufficient to meet human longing. The vanity of the beautiful woman before the mirror is the vanity of one who has mistaken a certain conventional beauty, which is entirely exhaustible, for the inexhaustible beauty which is the intimation of God in the world. To give herself over to this imaginary beauty is an act of self-destruction, a horrible alienation by which she passes into nothingness, renouncing herself to an imaginary divinity. In this state the woman becomes obedient to the force of gravity, becomes the slave to illusory values and so is reduced to the level of matter. In Well's words,

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light ... whereverthe virtueof supernatural is absent,everything laws as blind and exact as the laws of is obedientto mechanical gravitation.To know this is profitableand necessary. Those whomwe callcriminals onlytilesblownoffa roofby the wind are and fallingat random. Their only fault is the initialchoice by which they becamesuch tiles. (1973:28) Mutatis mutandis we may say that the fault of women mastered by male domination consists in their choice to accept the false values of patriarchy. A woman who makes this choice is turned in the wrong direction, and in this position suffers the greatest degradation without the counterweight of grace to bear her up. This is equally the condition of men who fill the void in their lives with the imaginary values of patriarchy, although, of course, this choice has different consequences for a man than for a woman.' 2. The power which is characteristic of patriarchy, according to feminism, is the power of force, the power of imposition. That is the very meaning of male domination, and the evidence of it is the tale of recorded history, which is, after all, the history of men: men conquering and extending their sway over new territories, subjecting peoples to alien control, bending the environment, natural and personal, to their wills. The form of patriarchalactivity is imposition and violation, and its paradigm case is rape. Patriarchy attempts, by dint of force, to conquer every void, to insert itself into all things, and by this act of self-expansion to give the world whatever reality it has. It makes everything instrumental to its will to power. This might be called the illusion of patriarchy. It has myriad expressions, all of which are characterized by the same insistence: viz., to domesticate the reality of the world, to strip the world of its independent reality and to make of it simply a means. The patriarchal imagination degrades the world to a state where it becomes possible to sustain the illusion of one's power over persons and things, a degradation which is more or less brutal, depending on the way in which power is exercised. For example, the older patriarchalview saw women simply as defective by nature, a defect that was physical, moral, and intellectual. Quite simply, women were seen as inferior and unfit for higher callings. In the later bourgeois expression of patriarchy the picture of women was altered and women were seen no longer as simply inferior, but rather were cast in terms of their complementarity to the male. The female was needed to nurture, uplift, and humanize the male, a function she served in keeping the home a
1 This is not to say that it is impossible for women to violate others or that it is impossible for men to live without violating others, but simply that the pattern of patriarchy is one of violation. Feminism is a movement that emerges out of women's experience, but it is not the exclusive province of one of the sexes.

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haven from the coasening effects of the work-world outside. In either case, however, women were kept in a state of dependency; they were defined by men for men, subject to a degrading force which is the expression of the patriarchal imagination. The alternative to the power of violation, which feminism identifies as the essential expression of patriarchy, is, according to Weil, the power of restraint, the model for which is the act of creation whereby God renounces the divine prerogative to be everything so that something else may be. God does not command in the creation, even though God has the power to do so; God accepts limitation for the love of the creatures God has made. Weil makes this image of God the very touchstone of true religion. The religionswhich have a conceptionof this renunciation, the effacementof God,his appardistance,this voluntary voluntary ent absenceandhis presencehere below,these religions true are into of religion,the translation different languages the greatRevelation. The religionswhich representdivinityas commanding whereverit hasthe powerto do so seem false. Even thoughthey are monotheistic they are idolatrous.(1973:145f.) According to Weil, legitimate human power is the power of attention; attention is the very form of all human creativity. This attention has other names: it may be called "compassion,"but it may also be called "justice." Indeed, the love of one's neighbor is nothing more nor less than justice, giving what is due to other creatures, which is to say, acknowledging their reality. The false divinity of patriarchy, on the other hand, has attempted to create women by attachment, by chaining them to certain sex-role stereotypes that preserve the power of male dominance. This attachment violates the distance necessary to appreciate the reality of the other, makes the other imaginary, unreal, a possession without a soul. Such attachment is the opposite of the love which respects the distance between persons, which is, in a sense, detached. Under the conditions of patriarchy women have received whatever reality they have by being attached to men. They have been permitted no independent reality, and in this sense, a great injustice has been perpetrated; they have in effect been made not to exist. When faced with the outrage of women who have awakened to their subordination in patriarchal society, it is common for men to respond that their intentions have been misconstrued, that they wanted nothing more than to give women special consideration, make special allowances for them, make them happy, as it were. What they did not realize of course was that in their solicitous efforts on women's behalf they were actually presuming the power to make women's lives, a presumption which is the opposite of love and the frustrationof justice. This presumption is characteristic of the false divinity which

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makes the real unreal. True divinity, according to Weil, makes the unreal real, a movement which has its image in the world in the form of attention to that which God has made, the appropriate imitation of God who actually has the power to bring into being that which does not exist. "Love sees what is invisible," (1973:149) and in the case of the patriarchal attachment of women, this means seeing what patriarchy has heretofore obliterated by the assertion of male divinity. Weil shows why this divinity is false, exposes its opposition to the love which is creative and by which God brings the world into being. Moreover, she indicates that this is the love by which the creation will be redeemed: Christ recapitualtes the Creator's original grace and announces that the love which is at the beginning is at the end as well. To the extent to which patriarchy obscures this love, it is found wanting by the judgment of God's Holy Spirit. It is a spiritualcrime and not simply moral obduracy. 3. Simone Weil writes: A case of contradictories which are true. God exists:God does not exist. Whereis the problem?I am quite surethat there is a Godin the sensethatI am quitesuremy love is not illusory.I am quitesurethereis not a Godin the sensethatI am quitesurethat nothing real can be anythinglike what I am able to conceive when I pronounce word. ButthatwhichI cannotconceiveis this not an illusion.(1972:103) These contradictories point to the problem of analogy, the problem of what terms are fitting for thinking about Deity. Surely none of our concepts is adequate to God. The infinite utterly outsoarsour conceiving. And yet, the believer is convinced of the reality of the infinite and strives to make sense of that which transcends sense absolutely. When patriarchal religion has attempted to make sense of the transcendental, it has employed male images, for these are the images that reflect what patriarchy deems loftiest. Hence Judaism commonly refers to God as King or Husband; Christianity'spreferred image of the Creator is that of Father. Feminists have viewed the use of exclusive male images as illustrative of the way in which the subordination of women has been theologized. Mary Daly has drawn out the implications of this sort of exclusivism in her now famous maxim, "If God is male, then the male is God." If God is what is highest and God is conceived in male terms, then the male is dominant and the female is subordinate. How could it be otherwise? To see how this is expressed in Christianitywe have only to look at 1 Corinthians 11:7-9, where St. Paul pays, "For a man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man. (For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.)" St. Paul attempts to soften this

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ordering of man and woman a few verses later, but it is a half-hearted attempt, and, in any case, the Christian tradition has consistently upheld the so-called "order of creation" (Genesis 2:18ff.) which was used to subordinate women to men in the home, in the congregation, and eventually everywhere in human society. Feminism has pointed out the absurdityof masculinizing God and the vast harm of deifying man, but where does this leave the Christian who has received his or her religion in the language of patriarchy? Is the Christian faith essentially patriarchal? Can Christianity survive, shorn of its patriarchalmane? These questions find their resolution in Weil's true contradictories. Because we have not reached the point where God exists, it is possible to think of God in terms that falsify Deity, and which, as a consequence, prevent us from ever coming to the point where God does exist. This is precisely what occurs when God is conceived in patriarchal images. The Christian is wedded to personalist images of God for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that those who have loved God in Christ have experienced personal contact with God, contact which Weil insists is not an illusion. But "personal" does not mean "male." At the point where God exists, God is not male, for God is not finite, and though our conceptions will always reflect the limitations of our creatureliness, there are nevertheless better and worse ways of conceiving that which cannot be conceived. The task is to find personalist images which are not simply anthropomorphisms. What this means is that we shall have to empty out the sense of all that is unworthy of God, and this would seem to include patriarchalconceptions of Deity. It is not just that such conceptions exclude the female principle from Godhead and so offend feminist sensibilities, but that they falsify Deity by arbitrarilylimiting the way in which God may be conceived. The feminist critique of patriarchal theological imagery has focused the sense in which atheism can be a purification of the religious. The God who is male must be rejected if one is to reach the point where God exists. The male God is a denial of the supernatural, and Weil has noted that, "The errors of our time come from Christianity without the supernatural" (1972:104). Surely the subordinationof women is a terrible error and worse, a crime against women's full humanity and a hindrance to Christian faith. If Christianity means "patriarchy,"then feminist atheism is possibly Christianity'spurification. I say "possibly"because there is an atheism which is not a purification of the religious, but its denial, and there are patterns of feminist ideology and spirituality which seem to me to have taken this route.2 But that this can occur does nothing to diminish the validity of Weil's
2 Rosemary Ruether (1982:132-142) has offered a useful criticism of counter-cultural

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warning that, "We have to be careful about the level on which we place the infinite. If we put it on the level which is only suitable for the finite it does not much matter what name we give it" (1972:xx). III Weil has observed that it is a great mistake to believe that one can rise upward by walking straight on; in other words, that there is hope for humanity that is not supernatural. The greatness of Weil's work is in its uncompromising and compelling commitment to the supernatural. In an age in which secularism has been realized in the West, when the spiritual is being wrung out of human life, Weil's work is the most radical challenge to the dominant culture. The tendency in the modern world has been to plane everything down to material relations and to systematicallyreplace reasons with causes, to extirpate the sacred so that nothing might suffer the onus of being profane. There is no institution and no social movement that has not been subject to this tendency. If the post-modern world is upon us, as some say it is, it is by no means clear that it is an age that is at odds with this tendency to seek the resolution of contradictions on the plane characterized by relations of force. Contemporary feminism has exposed in detail the sexual-castesystem according to which women are subordinated to men in virtually every cultural setting. This opposition of men and women is an instance of contradictories for which, according to Weil, there is no resolution on the plane of the opposition. It will not be enough to dethrone the male and elevate the female, for that is the perpetuation of patriarchal hierarchy: the oppression-domination cycle will not have been broken. Weil's contention is that for there to be genuine resolution of a contradiction the opposition will have to be raised to another plane, a movement which she identifies as grace. As she puts it, Whensomething seemsimpossible obtaindespiteevery effort, to it is an indication a limitwhichcannotbe passedon thatplane of and of the necessityfor a changeof level-a breakin the ceiling. To wear ourselvesout in effortson the same level degradesus. (1972:87f.) Accordingly, the contradiction which is at the root of the of the sexualcaste system can only be overcome by rising above the level of the opposing forces. This resolution is essentially spiritual,the product of a contact with supernatural grace which is distinct from every form of worldliness, which transcends the ethos and mythos of patriarchy, and
feminist spirituality. She regards this movement as offering a formula for marginalizing women, and as being based on an erroneous anthropology.

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hence which is not bound by the terms of the contradiction according to which women are oppressed by those who share their nature. The distinctive mark of Weil's spiritualityis that it is not reducible to aestheticism or moralism; it cannot be exhaustively schematized in terms of the sublimity and grandeur of great art or of the wonders of nature, nor can it be developed without remainder in ethical categories, two tendencies which can be traced back to Kant's attempt to rationalize the spiritual. Weil's work stands in rigorous opposition to both these tendencies, posing as it does the prospect of communion with the God who, although implicitly present in the world, is nevertheless Wholly Other, i.e., supernatural.3 Weil identifies the implicit presence of the supernaturalunder four distinct forms, each of which has the effect of bringing one into contact with the Divine and each of which can be rendered in terms which are relevant to the development of a feminist Christian spirituality. The first of these forms is the love of neighbor, which, for Weil, means justice; to love one's neighbor is to act to create the conditions of equality where they do not exist, to eliminate the relations of superiority-inferiority from our dealings with others, to dissolve this imaginary hierarchy into genuine relations of generosity and gratitude between those who are essentially equals but whose equality has been obscured by the accidental features of social position. In the case of patriarchy,justice will only be achieved when men give up their pretension without resentment in appreciation of the personhood of women, and when, at the same time, women forgive the pretension in appreciation of the personhood of men. There will be no justice, however much the material conditions separating women and men change, until the gravity which keeps women down has been transformed into grace, until the force which subordinateswomen has been overcome and the entirely natural resentment of that force has been surpassed. This is for Weil the promise of the love of God and additionally, it would seem, the hope of feminism. A second form of God's implicit love is present in the love of the beauty of nature. Feminist reflection is characterized by an ecological point of view, which is rooted in the understanding of persons as psycho-somatic unities, unities which, it is believed, have been torn asunder in patriarchalculture. As a consequence of this view feminists have called for the development of a non-exploitative technology which is in harmony with nature, which does not force nature to
3 What Weil means by "the supernatural" is summed up in the following: " [O]bedience to God, which, since God is beyond all that we can imagine or conceive, means obedience to nothing. This is at the same time impossible and necessary-in other words it is supernatural" (1972:88).

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become un-natural,but instead respects the order of the universe that is the very possibility of human existence. The physical world nurtures us physically and spiritually, for its beauty has the effect of purifying us, of making us aware of the fact that there is a good beyond our making, a goodness intimated in the beauty of the world which is independent of and indeed indifferent to us, even as it is the matrix out of which we live. In Weil's words: To empty ourselvesof our false divinity,to deny ourselves,to to give up being the center of the worldin imagination, discern that all pointsin the worldare equallycentersand that the true center is outside the world, this is to consent to the rule of mechanical necessityin matterandof free choiceat the centerof each soul. Suchconsentis love. The face of this love, which is turnedtowardthinkingpersons,is the love of our neighbor; the face turnedtowardmatteris love of the orderof the world,or love of the beauty of the world which is the same thing. (1973:160) The salient feature of this beauty is that it is a means to nothing else. At the same time, it has in it no finality. The beauty of the world sets us in a direction, but it does nt give us our destination. Like ourselves, it too is a creature. The third form of the implicit love of God comes to light in the love of religious practices. The implicit presence of God in religious practices is by virtue of the conventional purity of the practices, a purity which is unconditioned and hence an intimation of God's perfect purity. Without this conventional purity, the contact with evil in the world would, according to Weil, eventually wear us out, make it impossible to respond to that which is higher, or, in the language of faith, would make salvation impossible. Unless, for example, we can touch something which is untainted by patriarchalinfluence, we must eventually be swallowed up by the forces of patriarchy that dominate all of social life. A touchstone is necessary, something which is not of the patriarchalworld, or else we shall be dragged down into a despair which is peace with the relations of domination-subordination. This descent could be by any number of different paths, direct or circuitous. The point is that without the sustenance of something which is conventionally pure, the world will exhaust us, and we shall succumb to its power. For Weil the essence of this conventional purity is the Eucharist,a sacrament which is perfectly absurd,portraying,as it does, the real presence of God in a bit of bread. The presence is inexplicable, and yet it is real, for the reception of the sacrament has the capacity to sanctify, to lift one up above the evil that is endemic in mundane life. The last form of the implicit love of God is, for Weil, friendship.

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She describes friendship as a union of the opposites of necessity and liberty. Friendship requires equality which can only emerge when, "a person consents to view from a certain distance, and without coming any nearer, the very being who is as necessary to him as food" (1973:205). In friendship each party acts to preserve the freedom of the other. It is this preservation of free consent in both parties which is the source of equality in the relationship. If the relationship is characterized by patterns of slavishness or domination, it is no longer friendship, but a kind of necessity which is "the principle of impurity" in human relations. And it is this impurity that is characteristic of human relations under patriarchy. Friendship between women and men is poisoned by the subordination of women. The patriarchal ordering of relations allows women only instrumental value. The autonomy of women is denied, and as a consequence, the self-being of women is obliterated. The mechanism of patriarchy thereby annihilates the possibility of friendship with the following results: We hate what we are dependentupon. We become disgusted with what depends on us. Sometimesaffectiondoes not only become mixedwith hatredand revulsion; is entirelychanged it
into it. (1973:204)

On the other hand, the model for perfect friendship and the judgment on patriarchal relations is the Trinity in which the divine Persons are at once perfectly united and perfectly distinct. It is Weil's contention that God is implicitly present in the world in these four loves. The soul which gives itself to these loves is turned toward the divine, poised to receive the love of God explicitly, in consequence of which, Weil assures us, we become awakened to the full reality of friends and neighbors, the beauty of the order of nature, and the purity of religious ceremony. The soul's exposure to contact with God transposes all of its relations to a higher key, lifts it out of the world of phantasms and abstraction, and reveals to it the reality of its loves. For the soul that has been so raised, God has become All in all. These four loves constitute the core of Weil's spirituality, and each, as has been shown, allows for an interpretation which has important implications for the construction of a spirituality that is both feminist and Christian. We have seen in the foregoing that although Weil's work was not self-consciously feminist, it nevertheless anticipates much of the feminist challenge to patriarchalvalues and culture. But more than that, we can see that her work sheds light on the spiritual consequences of the subordinationof women, the sense in which patriarchy is an offense not only to feminist sensibilities, but is an impediment to the realization of the love of God. Even as Weil's work suggests the lineaments of a feminist spiritualitythat is genuinely tran-

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scendental, so too does it present possibilities for a Christian spirituality set free of the patriarchal influences that have obscured the light which Christiansbelieve Christ shed on life, human and divine. As has been observed in a recent book, (Allen) Simone Weil was an outsider, one who stood on the threshold of the Church and from that position addressed those outside as well as those inside. This characteristic of Weil's life and work is well-illustrated in the way in which she is able to illumine the questions of spirituality that are the product of the feminist criticism of contemporary life and the traditions out of which contemporary life has emerged. There is a universal quality in her work which is perhaps the sign that she is a trustworthy guide, even in matters that seem on first glance to be beyond her compass.

REFERENCES
Allen,Diogenes 1983
1982

ThreeOutsiders.Cambridge, MA.:CowleyPublications.
Disputed Questions: On Being a Christian. Nashville:

Radford Ruether,Rosemary

Press. Abingdon

Weil,Simone 1972 1973

and Grace.London:Routledge KeganPaul. and Gravity God. New York:Harper& Row. Waiting for