On Simone Weil

 Weil identified specific contingencies that she set as preconditions for engaging with the divine. Paying attention was necessary, attention being a state of mind to be cultivated and mastered in order to make oneself available for the possibility of grace, for the presence of God. “Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer,” she insisted. Attention required an active condition of waiting, of expectation. At the very moment we achieve emptiness, the presence of the divine floods into us. We are simultaneously drained and filled.

Weil was distrustful of the imagination, holding it in disdain, seeing it as antithetical to attention. “The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.” She felt that the imagination’s fostering of personal identity threatened to obstruct the threshold to God. To be attentive to reality in all of its mystery, she claimed, we must be far from our own individual desires and anxieties. “We only attain to real prayer after we have worn down our will.” This did not sit well with Czapski, for whom imagination and will were both necessary. Will, he believed, had saved him, kept him from descending into atonie. Czapski knew that Weil, too, had been driven by will and that these dictates were cautionary checks on herself as much as on her readers.

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Weil believed the perfection of an individual spiritual life was predicated upon a consent to be nothing. The role of imagination, by contrast, is to generate something. “The imagination, filler up of the void, is essentially a liar.” She described the imagination as a combleuse du vide, a usurper of the emptiness, through which God might otherwise approach us. “There is the real presence of God in everything which imagination does not veil.” Czapski, for whom imagination was the very breath of life, struggled with Weil’s vehemence. How could he possibly accept any thought of discarding imagination or, by extension, abandoning art? All the same, he was able to find in Weil’s emphasis on attention the very condition he sought when drawing, the prayer-like activity he engaged in on a daily basis with a degree of faith equal to any other he held dear. Imagination, made manifest in drawing, had helped him to survive.

He found Weil’s deliberate asceticism a problem, aggravating him at a time when he was not painting but only still dreaming of his return to it. Could art really be vanity, a delusion, an obstacle to God’s grace? Certainly Weil’s great mentor, Blaise Pascal, thought so, and she conscientiously followed his footsteps on the path to knowledge and faith. She had undergone a profoundly unsettling religious conversion not unlike Pascal’s. Weil found in Pascal “that transcendent realm to which only the truly great minds have access, and wherein truth abides.” She looked to Pascal as a role model, as a teacher from whom she could learn, with whom she could argue, in full awareness of her insignificance in relation to his genius. Czapski would come to look to Weil in much the same way.

He saw that Pascal’s retreat from the world and his contempt for the senses were not entirely incompatible with the concerns of Proust, among the most worldly and epicurean of writers:

It’s not in the name of God, nor in the name of religion, that the protagonist of À la recherche rejects everything, yet he, too, like Pascal, is struck by a shattering revelation: he also buries himself, half-alive, in his cork-lined room (here I willingly blur the distinction between the hero and Proust himself since in this case they are one) to serve until death what became for him an absolute, his artistic work. The last book of his novel, Le Temps retrouvé, is likewise mixed with “tears of joy,” is the triumphant hymn of a man who has sold all his worldly possessions to buy a single precious pearl, who has measured all the ephemera, all the heartbreak, all the vanity of the joys of the world, of youth, of fame, of eroticism, and holds them up in comparison with the joy of the artist, this being who, in constructing each sentence, making and then remaking each page, is in search of an absolute he can never entirely attain, and which, besides, is ultimately unattainable.

Forming an alliance between the distinct but overlapping universes of Pascal and Proust, Czapski shaped himself intellectually, and in this mind-set his rapprochement with Weil was finally forged. “The supreme function of reason,” Pascal suggested in Pensées, “is to show man that some things are beyond reason.” In this territory “beyond reason” lay the dominion where Pascal, Weil, Proust, and Czapski found common ground. Czapski’s demands upon himself, often repeated—“How can I be better?” and “How can I remain true to myself ?”—intersect at this juncture where his thoughts met Weil’s. Her words unsettled and agitated him, but he held his ground. Her presence in his spiritual life, often adversarial, was enormously welcome, fortifying, and affirming.

from Almost Nothing

The 20th-Century Art and Life of Józef Czapski

by Eric Karpeles