David Banach

Saint Anselm College

Eternity and the Bondage of Time:
Whitehead and Spinoza on Grace and Affliction in Simone Weil

ABSTRACT

“On God's part creation is not an act of self-

expansion but of restraint and renunciation. God

and all his creatures are less than God alone. God

accepted this diminution. He emptied a part of

his being from himself. . . . Our existence is made

up only of his waiting for our acceptance not to

exist. He is perpetually begging from us that

existence which he gives.”

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 32.

For Simone Weil, affliction plays a special role in making conscious creatures aware of their place in creation and in returning the gift of creation through the returning action of grace. Two of the most difficult ideas to get clear about in Simone Weil’s thought are this special role of affliction and the metaphysical status of the action of grace. These can be elucidated by using the metaphysical schemes of Benedict Spinoza and Alfred North Whitehead. Spinoza’s account of bondage and the relation of creature to God can be used to interpret Weil’s account of creation and the special role of affliction in the returning action of grace. Whitehead’s account of the action of the eternal within the non-terminating process of the primordial nature of God can add some content to the way that grace functions in opposition to the gravity of the mechanical force of necessity in the physical world.

For Spinoza, our mind is God’s idea of our body as actually existing. That means that in order for us to have come into existence God must have set himself in bondage, must have limited his perception of the world to just what can be perceived through our body within the working of the causal chain of necessity that gave rise to it. This appears to be exactly Weil’s notion of creation as God withdrawing and separating himself from himself. In Spinoza, bondage is our natural and inevitable condition as creatures. When we feel joy it is a happy coincidence of the laws of necessity with our natures, but affliction reveals our fundamental nature as creatures and leads us to an acquiescence to the necessity and separation that gave rise to us, through intuition or the third kind of knowledge. Affliction negates the personal part of us that is in bondage and reveals the action of the eternal part of our being.

Whitehead’s account of forms or eternal objects as potentialities that structure the never-ending concrescence of the primordial nature of God can elucidate this action of grace in response to affliction. For Whitehead the essence of the eternal is that it is a becoming that is never finished, whose potentiality is never exhausted in actuality. He calls this infinite act of becoming the primordial nature of God. Particular objects come to exist by the closing off and sundering of little parts of this in drops of process, or actual entities. These actual entities feel the still open possibilities within eternal objects as lures for feeling and becoming, drawing them to what they as entities can never fulfill. These eternal objects are graded for relevance to the becoming of each actual entity by its place in the network of necessary relationships that define its place in the universe. Affliction allows us to feel the full weight of this nexus of necessity concentrated on us at one point in space and time. It reveals to us precisely what we are, the squeezing off a finite bit of becoming, and allows us to feel the threads of where we came from, the lure of these eternal potentialities drawing us out of our personal being into the eternal. This gradation of relevance of the eternal objects for an entity by its place in necessity is precisely what Weil means by the role of affliction in opening us to the returning action of grace.