Forgetting Jung's Tree

A dear friend recently offered some timely advice. She wrote: "Forget about Jung's tree. Tend to your tomatoes. They are just as important and life-giving." Being late winter in these southern climes, our tomato seeds are safely stored on sheets of tissue until the frosts have softened and spring's fires risen sufficiently to rouse them into a new and hopefully fruitful cycle.

I took the cue however, and cleared the hundreds of small weeds lavishing around the green spears thrust forth from around 400 garlic cloves planted in our garden under the full moons of May and June. We are a big family and we all love our garlic.

I have never forgotten Jung's tree. Carl Jung is remembered for demurring from the strictly libidinal psychology of Sigmund Freud with whom he had a curious relationship over several years before they finally parted ways in 1913.

One of Jung's major contributions to the life of the mind was his introduction of the notion of synchronicity to a wider Western audience. The term itself was coined by Jung to describe the interpenetration of psychic and physical space that manifests in the simultaneous occurrence of events that are not connected causally, but from which meaning can often be drawn.

Apparently unrelated events can coincide in ways that are highly suggestive of deep and often numinous meaning. Such events invite an integrative interpretation wherein rational and logical categories are transcended and a unitive perspective of one's life and circumstance becomes more available. The ego dissolves as one is confronted by deeply meaningful patterns of confluence within one's life and circumstance. Through such experiences, one more easily inclines towards the notion that we are moved by more than meaningless chance and blind necessity.

Jung's Death

After his wife died in 1955, Carl Jung spent much time in the garden of their home at Bollingen, situated on the shores of Lake Zurich in Switzerland. He would often read and rest in the shade of a magnificent old poplar tree during the summer months. It became one of his favourite places during his latter years.

Jung died on the afternoon of June 6th, 1961. While taking his final breaths, a great storm erupted around lake Zurich. As his body slowly cooled on his death-bed, the storm intensified locally. A bolt of lightning cleaved the sky, striking and splitting into two the poplar tree under which he had spent so much time.

This remarkable phenomenon has been viewed as a manifestation of the very principle of synchronicity that Jung had devoted so many years and so much energy. It was as a metaphoric affirmation of the reality of synchronicity as an inherent aspect of human experience. The magnitude and power of the event also pointed towards the titanic capabilities present within human consciousness.

Yet that was not all. At the time of Jung's death, his long-standing friend and confidante Laurens van der Post was returning to Europe from Africa. Completely unaware that Jung had died, van der Post dreamed that Jung was on the summit of Zermatt, Mount Matterhorn. In the dream, Jung waved to him and called out: "I'll be seeing you."

Some years later, van der Post returned to Bollingen with a film crew for what were to be the final takes of a documentary about Jung's life. In his Jung and the Story of our Time, Van der Post described what happened that afternoon:

"When the moment came for me to speak directly to the camera about Jung's death, and I came to the description of how the lightning demolished Jung's favorite tree, the lightning struck again in the garden. The thunder crashed out so loudly that I winced, and to this day the thunder, wince, and the impediment of speech it caused are there in the film for all to see, just as the lightning is visible on the screen over the storm-tossed lake and wind-whipped trees."

The Revolving Door 

It is important to understand that such manifestations are not solely the domain of daemonic men such as Carl Jung, or of great siddhas such as Padmasambhava and inspired saints such as Teresa of Avila or Padre Pio of Pietrelcina. Many of us can find similar intimations - though probably far less dramatic - in our own experiences or the experiences of family members or friends.

We do not need to actively seek out such experiences. They usually arrive uninvited and unanticipated. When I was in my early twenties, a friend described to me how, while watching the sea in a deeply reflective state one afternoon, he vividly experienced the presence of a close friend he had not seen for over a year. He learned a few days later that his friend had been killed in a motor accident that very day.

My father several times recounted one of his own unforgettable experiences while in a prisoner-of-war camp in South Africa. He woke suddenly from a deep sleep to find his mother, dressed in white, standing at the end of his bed. She smiled and then disappeared even as he watched her. Three weeks later, he received news from Italy that she had died on the day that she appeared to him.

In my own life, there were several occasions in the months after my own mother's death when I experienced her living presence in synchronic irruptions of both luminous and imaginal events.

One does not need to lean exclusively on the reports of such individuals as the Dalai Lama or Elisabeth Kubler-Ross to contemplate the continuity between life and death.

Of Mind and Matter

There is a peculiar polarity in the world that arcs, on the one hand, between a fascination with anomalous events that break through the commonly-accepted boundaries of what is possible, and on the other, an outright rejection of anything that is not circumscribed by a limited, limiting and often tyrannical rationality.

The various methods of shamanism, the practices of yoga and tai chi, the ways of prayer and contemplation, and the focussed attention that may arise in times of grief and deep personal or collective crisis can all give rise to an intensification of consciousness and a loss of the egoic boundaries that limit and block our awareness of synchronic events and of non-duality. Such experiences have the potential to act as instruments of transformation that may prompt us to re-evaluate the dominant and insistent ethos of materialism that stridently denies the reality of the numinous while proclaiming life to be devoid of any transcendent meaning.

Most wisdom traditions accept that the gift of a sensitised consciousness capable of apprehending the subtle - and occasionally dramatic - mental and energetic fields within which we live and move and have our being does not usually fall out of the sky. Such states of consciousness are both created and sustained by the cultivation of a reflective and disciplined attention. Whether one places a value on pursuing such states and the understandings that may arise from them is, of course, another matter.

To find balance is a difficult thing. Thomas Merton long sought to encourage the practice of contemplation in a world driven by action. And more recently, the reflections of Thomas Berry remain an ongoing rejoinder to pause within the busyness of our destructive times in order to connect more deeply with each other and with the living forces that act through the natural world.

Let us take the time while yet we can to catch the whispers in the wind, to marvel at the light glancing through the diamond dews of morning, to ride the luminous skyscapes edging fiery clouds at day's end - even while fetching wood, carrying water and tending the tomato seedlings.

Vincent Di Stefano D.O., M.H.Sc.
August 2011

Burning Horizons. Dirge for a Savaged Earth

This original piece offers a poetic reflection on the moral obscenity of aerial warfare as it has been exercised from the attack on Dresden in February 1945 to the sacking of Baghdad in March 2003.

Production Notes
Music: Nico Di Stefano
Voice:  Vincent Di Stefano



Burning Horizons can be streamed using the media player above. A CD quality mp3 file is available for download here.

 What was it like when Dresden was sleeping
And the sky shrieked metal then crashed all around
And the town was a furnace a fiery hell-world
For mothers and children now under the ground

And what was it like that big-sky morning
When Little Boy cried then howled down the day
The crashing of atoms the tempest of terror
The unknowing mothers all blown away

First in Kabul and then on the Tigris
Silicon soldiers tore open the night
And wounded yet further a people near broken
And brought further darkness in fulminant light

The hatred now stored in the cones of the missiles
That rage and release in ruin and woe
And the heart of the night pierced again with fierce metal
The blood and the water continue to flow

I wait for the turn of a cheek that was promised
I wait for the love of a world now in woe
I wait for the call of a sorrowing mother
For terror on terror can nowhere go

Vincent Di Stefano
July 2011

The Herbal Medicine Tradition. A Long-burning Torch for Darkening Times

Joseph Wright, The Alchymist 1771

Practitioners of herbal medicine hold the curious privilege of being carriers of a tradition whose origins cannot be traced during a time when traditional knowledge has been devalued by a technocratic ethos that celebrates transience and power.

Contemporary biomedicine continuously surfs the edge of ever-imminent "breakthroughs" that promise the conquest of refractory diseases and conditions through the discovery of new drugs. There are regular calls for increased funding from all available sources, from government, industry and the donations of a generous public in order that such salvific developments can proceed unhindered.

The biomedical establishment draws upon the energy of numerous dedicated individuals and also draws from the immense reserves of both national governments and multinational corporations in the knowledge that any successful "breakthrough" will bring immense financial returns.

The whole apparatus hangs on the assumption that there will be uninterrupted freedom and continuity in the various institutions and infrastructures through which such activities are initiated, pursued, marketed and delivered to established "health care" networks. We are just beginning to understand that business may not necessarily continue as usual in what is becoming an increasingly uncertain future.

The resources deployed within the biomedical enterprise are huge. They begin with the medical schools throughout the world that induct elite cadres of young aspirants through rigorous initiations which include a not-so-subtle professional socialisation while providing detailed and extensive training in anatomy, physiology, histology, embryology and pathology. The public hospitals in which their developing skills are exercised consist of vast and finely coordinated structures in which ambulance facilities, casualty departments, in-patient wards, operating theatres, intensive care wards, pathology units and pharmacy departments are serviced by large numbers of paramedics, nurses, nutritionists and caterers. medical officers, specialists, cleaners and hospital administrators.

The hospital system itself both supports and is supported by medical practitioners within the general community, by manufacturers of medical hardware ranging from disposable syringes, swabs and bandages to intravenous drips, cardiac monitors, fibre optic devices, defibrillators and magnetic resonance imaging scanners, and by a vast and powerful multinational pharmaceutical industry that produces the drugs which are dispensed and sold in huge quantities throughout the world.

This vast and interconnected network of activities both defines and supports the institution of biomedicine. Most governments in the developed world uphold this structure through political and legislative support, through the bankrolling of medical schools and public hospitals, and through subsidising the cost of diagnostic testing and pharmaceutical drugs.

Practitioners of herbal medicine are largely outside of the loop. They have little if any legislative support, receive their training in exceedingly modest educational facilities, have no access to the public hospital system, limited access to diagnostic services, and a questionable professional status. Despite this, the practice of herbal medicine continues to remain a vital and enduring source of satisfaction both for those who would carry the tradition through mastery of its methods and for those who seek out the services of knowledgeable practitioners.

What is going on here? Are practitioners of herbal medicine a quaint and harmless anachronism determined to cleave to largely discarded ways during a time where health care in most of the developed world has been technologised, corporatised and universalised? Are those who practise herbal medicine obstinately refusing to accept the reality of modernism with its celebration of centralisation, globalisation and standardisation? How is it that they do not covet the awesomely powerful methods that have become the signatures of biomedicine? Just what does the contemporary practice of herbal medicine represent?

The Promethean Entrancement

Francis Bacon

Much of the driving force that has propelled technological civilisation and its remarkable productions - including biomedicine - derives its influence from a philosophical position that separates us from the natural world. Francis Bacon exhorted all who would build the New Atlantis to subject nature to their will and to forcibly extract those "secrets" that enable control and mastery of her forces. By mid-century, Rene Descartes declared the world and all that was in it to be a soulless machine that could be understood, controlled and manipulated by the exercise of human reason. And by the end of the century, Isaac Newton had confirmed that the physical universe operated according to immutable laws that, once known and understood, conferred immense powers of control and predictability to those who understood them.

The so-called European "Enlightenment" further encouraged a philosophical clearing of the decks of all that was deemed to be uncertain or "irrational" in order that a new era based on development, progress and control could proceed without interference.

The fruits of such methods and understandings have, over the past three centuries, completely transformed the world. Yet our fascination with the productions of industry and technology, and our participation in the power they confer, have blinded us to their effects on our view of ourselves, on our relationship with powerful institutions, and on our sensitivity to the natural world.

At the most basic level, we have become perversely and erroneously alienated from those potencies within our own natures and within the natural world by which we are formed, sustained and regenerated. Though we may live by more than bread alone, that bread has now been tainted and denatured by the methods of industrial agriculture and food production. Top-soils have been everywhere destroyed; fruits, often laced with low levels of insecticide residues, are gathered long before they are ripe and transported over long distances - even across the great oceans - before they reach our tables; the genetic structure of many staple grains has been knowingly altered with unknown consequences to future generations; the bee populations in many countries have begun to cave under the onslaught of agricultural chemicals. And this is to say nothing of the obscene plethora of heavily processed foods stacked on the overburdened shelves of supermarkets everywhere.

We seem to have collectively lost sight of the fact that our physical bodies are continuously reconstituted from the foods that we eat, the air that we breathe, and the liquids that we drink. In the early 1950s, long before chemical-heavy industrial agriculture had reached anything like its present levels, Max Gerson showed through his nutritionally-based cancer therapy the vital importance of using fresh, unprocessed, chemical-free foods if health is to be restored in serious conditions. This understanding has yet to reach the busy kitchens of public hospitals throughout the Western world.

The anatomising of the body into its constituent tissues and organs is echoed in the anatomising of our foodstuffs into their constituent fats, proteins, sugars and calories. There is no measure that can accommodate the integrity, the totality and the equilibrium of living matter.

Dark Fruits

And so it is with the natural world. Our civilisation has recklessly plundered every identifiable resource with little thought to its relationship with the rest of the created order. Our forests have been felled, our soils destroyed, our rivers and lakes laden with the detritus of industry, our oceans robbed of their myriad fish species, our air oppressed by the burning of fossil fuels. And we wonder why the cost of health care throughout the developed world continues to steadily escalate despite the endless "breakthroughs" and all the fancy hardware and clever medicines.

Two decades ago, Thomas Berry reflected:

"We cannot have well humans on a sick planet. Medicine must first turn its attention to protecting the health and well being of the Earth before there can be any effective human health."

Guarding the Flame

Before we can seriously direct our attention to protecting the health and well being of the earth, we must somehow reverse our sense of separation from the phenomenal world. We must somehow shake free from the illusion that we are masters of creation capable of doing what we will with both the earth and with our bodies. We must somehow reconnect with the forces that unite us with the natural world from which we can never truly be separate without damaging ourselves and the world within which we live.

The force by which a grain of pollen unites with an ovule to produce a seed that carries the full potency of the parent plant is no different to that which enables every new human life to come into existence. The power by which a plant draws water and nutrients from the earth, and oxygen, carbon dioxide and sunlight from the air to produce its myriad structures and chemical compounds is no different to that which enables our physical bodies to grow and to repair themselves after injury and illness.

Howard Terpning. Medicine Man, 1983

Generations of healers in all times and in all places have identified plants that will serve as reliable allies so long as we continue to take human form upon the earth. In the present time, the biomedical profession has claimed the exclusive right to make use of extracts and derivatives of such plants as Papaver somniferum, the opium poppy, Claviceps purpurea, ergot of rye, Digitalis purpurea and D. lanata, the purple and woolly foxgloves, Ephedra sinensis, ma huang, and Atropa belladonna, the deadly nightshade. Yet these and other powerful plants were long known and used skilfully and carefully by untold generations of healers, herbalists, midwives and shamans. These and many other plants of softer power will continue to spring forth from both wild and cultivated spaces for as long as the earth remains hospitable and habitable.

There will always be a community of knowledgeable individuals who will safeguard and transmit the knowledge of how these plants can enable us to better pass through the pains and afflictions that are an inevitable part of human life.

The methods of phytochemistry and pharmacology have recently confirmed the particular usefulness of many plants which have long been used in the various herbal medicine traditions. These include such plants as Echinacea angustifolia, which stimulates activity in the immune system, Ginkgo biloba, which enhances cerebral circulation, Serenoa repens, which is useful in the treatment of prostatic enlargement, Hypericum perforatum, used in the treatment of depression and other nervous system disorders, Crataegus monogyna, which can lower blood pressure and stimulate coronary circulation, Valeriana officinalis, useful in the treatment of insomnia, and Silybum marianum and Cynara scolymus, both of which support liver function. Such plants and their extracts are no longer used exclusively by herbalists and are now prescribed or recommended to patients by a growing number of practitioners of biomedicine.

Yet there remain may other plants within the herbal medicine traditions whose actions are perhaps too subtle to be easily determined by the harsh methods of phytochemical fractionation and pharmaceutical statistics. It is important to understand that medicinal plants and their extracts are categorically different to the pharmaceutical drugs used in biomedicine. A single medicinally active plant or its extract typically contains small quantities of numerous compounds and influences which can, both individually and synergistically, interact with our own natures. Although any given plant may contain a specific potency, as is the case with opium poppies and their narcotic alkaloids, foxglove and its cardioactive glycosides, and the buckthorns with their purgative anthracenosides, most plants used as medicines carry a constellation of influences which may include minerals, organic acids, essential oils, bitter compounds, flavonoids, steroids and so forth. This is certainly the case with such gentle treasures as lemon balm, golden rod, white horehound, cleavers, agrimony, motherwort, chamomile, plantain, dandelion, yarrow and many other plant medicines.

During this time when the ways of herbal medicine are often dismissed and demeaned as outmoded and useless superstitions, we are well advised to deepen our familiarity with the healing plants both in our gardens and in the wild. This will ensure that regardless of whether the future holds a bang or a whimper, this soft system of healing will remain available as a living force for the benefit of future generations.

Vincent Di Stefano D.O., M.H.Sc.
May 2011

Where Do We Take Our Instructions?

We tend as a society to remove from sight those realities that may disturb our sense of order, of control, of comfort, of civilised pleasantness. It is very tempting to arrange things so that one lives a predictable and well-cushioned life shielded from the human wreckage that lies just below the surface. Yet something as simple as spending an hour or two in a railway carriage outside of peak hour can reveal how wafer-thin the veneer of social order and civility can be. And the surprising number of young people begging for food and money in and around the streets of central Melbourne reveals further what lies behind the façade of affluence and self-satisfaction that is everywhere projected. One does not need to walk the streets of Calcutta to know the faces of the dispossessed and the privation and deep need that everywhere burdens the life of so many.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta was born of a peasant family in Albania in 1910. Her father died when she was a young child and she was raised in the simple faith of her community. She joined the Loreto Sisters at the age of 18, having already decided when she was 12 years old that she would one day serve as a missionary in India. After a short stay in Ireland, she arrived in north India in 1929. Over the next 20 years, she formalised her religious vows and served as a teacher in a Loreto convent school for girls in Calcutta.

In 1948 after experiencing a profoundly transformative personal revelation, she departed the convent, replaced her regular Loreto habit with a plain blue-lined cotton sari, and immersed herself in the street life of Calcutta. After securing modest accommodation, she immediately started a small school for girls and began visiting the destitute and the dying who were everywhere to be found in the city. Her work was sanctioned by Rome in 1952 and the small group of women that had formed around her took on the name "Missionaries of Charity."

By the time Mother Teresa departed this world in 1997, her order had grown from a group of 13 women living in a small convent in Calcutta to over 600 missions housing 4,500 nuns in 123 countries. Among those missions were numerous hospices, centres for the care of leprosy, tuberculosis and AIDS sufferers, orphanages, refuges for the destitute and homeless, and schools. This simple woman from Albania had in a short 50 years brought selfless service and loving presence into the lives of the most neglected and abandoned among us in over 100 countries throughout the world.

While listening to Radio National some time ago, I caught the unmistakeable tarnished tones of Christopher Hitchens speaking at what was obviously a large public gathering. My attention sharpened when I heard an oblique mention of Mother Teresa's name, and roars of laughter and applause from a clearly adulatory audience. This unexpectedly brought to mind an article I had read some months earlier in which Hitchens had relentlessly attacked the life and work of Mother Teresa.

I decided to look into this a little further. There was no shortage of material on the Net. It is no secret that Hitchins has had it in not only for organised religion, but particularly for Mother Teresa for many years. One particularly abundant source of written, audio and video material regarding Hitchins and his ideas is the website of his close friend, Richard Dawkins. There is clearly a brotherhood of sorts among a small and vocal cadre of militant atheists who have made it their mission to dispel the darkness and folly of religious thought and aspiration with the enlightened understanding that this world is an essentially groundless and meaningless phenomenon wrought of the play of random chance and mindless chaos.

The English-speaking world was introduced to Mother Teresa and her work through Malcolm Muggeridge's film "Something Beautiful For God" which was broadcast by the BBC in 1969. Twenty-five years later, the English-speaking world was given a differing view of Mother Teresa and her work by Christopher Hitchins. His film "Hell's Angel", co-written with his then-ally Tariq Ali, was broadcast by the BBC in 1994. Like Muggeridge, Hitchens followed up with a book which was provocatively titled "The Missionary Position."

Hitchen's film is a breathtaking assault on Mother Teresa. In it, he describes her as "a demagogue, obscurantist and servant of earthly powers." After dismissing "that old fraud and mountebank" Malcolm Muggeridge, Hitchins begins his harangue by criticising the modest facilities and rudimentary methods used in the House for the Dying in Calcutta.

Nowhere is there any acknowledgement that Mother Teresa and her nuns were working voluntarily under near-impossible conditions with no institutional support. Nowhere is there any mention that the derelicted men and women in the House of the Dying had been literally gathered from the streets, having been ignored and sidestepped by passers-by. And nowhere is there any mention that even if they somehow managed to get themselves to any of the public hospitals in Calcutta, they would not have been admitted. Such was the reality of life for the dispossessed in Calcutta.

Nor does Hitchens bother acknowledging that Mother Teresa and her nuns always maintained respect for the wishes and beliefs of those who were brought to the House of the Dying. Muslims were read the Koran, Hindus were brought water from the Ganges, And Catholics were administered the Sacraments. From Hitchens' elevated perspective, such ministrations were quaint and essentially useless exercises.

Speaking in front of a grotesque caricature of Mother Teresa which was an ever-present background image, Hitchens directed his silken vehemence towards her views on abortion and on her occasional meetings with politicians of influence. He effectively glossed over her work with the dying, with lepers, with the orphaned and the homeless as a well-meaning but misguided and inconsequential form of social work.

Nowhere does Hitchins reflect on the fact that, unlike himself, Mother Teresa's place was always with the lowly, with the abandoned and the damaged; that her work was based on love and on a transcendent vision of humanity and divinity; that she was a simple but strong-minded nun working selflessly within the framework of an institutional Catholicism laden with its own share of anachronisms and neuroses.

Regardless of Hitchins' cynical and stone-hearted polemic, the fact remains that through the drive and dedication of this woman, hundreds of thousands of individuals have been graced by the experience of human warmth and loving presence during their time of greatest frailty and vulnerability. Like Brother Francis of Assisi before her, Mother Teresa of Calcutta was gifted with the capacity to see and to honour the presence of divinity within every broken life that she encountered.

We are assailed on all fronts by conflicting views of what is in our interests and what is not, of what is correct and what is erroneous, of what is necessary and what is expedient, of what is fact and what is fable. Argumentation may win or lose debates, but matters of human truth cleave more to simple turnings of the heart than clever turnings of the tongue.

Vincent Di Stefano
February 2011

Of Poverty and Potency. The Reluctant Mysticism of Simone Weil

I have recently re-read "Waiting on God", a collection of letters and essays by Simone Weil, an extraordinary woman remembered by her iconic refusal to yield to the ways of this world. This has prompted me to look a little further into her life and writings in order to better understand the roots of her obstinacy and her determination to cut through both the deluded drives of an industrial civilisation in its death throes and her own attachment to the things of this world - even to the point of her own physical survival.

Simone Weil offers a clarifying perspective for a world that has lost all sense of its own addiction to destructive and dehumanising ways, and to what religious historian Alex Nava has described as "the madness of reason and the insanity of much of our politics, economics and social lives."

Despite Susan Sontag's frustration with "the fanatical asceticism of Simone Weil's life, her contempt for pleasure and for happiness, her noble and ridiculous political gestures, her elaborate self-denials, her tireless courting of affliction", Weil remains a rare and precious presence in the intellectual and spiritual life of the twentieth century. Despite her eccentricities and extreme self-privations, she embodied a searing analytical intelligence capable of uncovering the pathologies of power and its exercise, a social consciousness grounded in empathic identification with the oppressed and the poor, a deep mystical understanding born of unsought and unanticipated transcendental experiences, and a prophetic insight that demanded the renewal of commitment to universal justice. Although she died at the age of 34 years, her life and writings remain a well-spring of passion for human freedom and compassion for human affliction.

Simone Weil was born in Paris of Jewish parents on February 3rd 1909. Her unusual sensitivity and intelligence were evident from an early age. When she was six years old, she declared at the family table that she would no longer eat sugar but would send her portions to French soldiers who were fighting on the front. Such acts of self-denial and identification with those suffering privation due to war or famine increased during the course of her brief life and culminated in a virtual self-immolation in the months prior to her death in England in 1943, where despite her ill-health, she refused to consume any more food than was eaten by her near-starving countrymen and women in occupied France.

While still a young child, she had committed to memory entire tracts of the French poet and tragic dramatist, Jean Racine. By the time she was 12 years old, she was studying ancient Greek texts. At the age of 15, she commenced her formal studies with the philosopher and essayist Emile Chartier in preparation for the entrance exam at the National University in Paris. Three years later, Weil achieved the top score in the exam, followed by her class-mate, Simone de Bouvoir who came in second. In his article, "Prophetic Mysticism", Alex Nava describes an encounter between these powerful women at the time:

"While Weil was preparing to take the entrance exam for the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure, she was approached by the young Simone de Bouvoir who was fascinated by the reputation of Weil's intelligence, ascetic appearance, and sensitivity to others' suffering (apparently some students had found Weil weeping for famine victims in China). During their conversation, Weil proclaimed that the only thing that mattered was the revolution that would feed all the starving people on earth. Bouvoir responded by saying that the problem is to find a reason for human existence. Looking her up and down, Weil retorted, 'It's easy to see that you've never gone hungry.'"

While at university, Weil immersed herself in a study of the classics and of political and economic systems, particularly Marxism. Her graduation thesis, entitled "Science and Perception in Descartes", argued that Descartes' method was in large part responsible for the unbalanced approach to knowledge and reality that had corrupted much of European thinking.

After graduation, Simone Weil taught philosophy at a girls' high school in the town of Le Puys near the French Alps. She lost no time in becoming politically active, throwing in her lot with local unemployed workers and writing prolifically on leftist politics and labour issues. She soon became known as the red virgin because of her anarchist leanings and her undisguised asceticism. Her nonconformist and challenging views proved too much for the locals, and she soon found herself transferred out of the area.

On hearing about the political activities of Adolf Hitler, she went to Germany in 1932 in order to see for herself what was happening there. Simone Weil continually sought to understand the political currents that were sweeping through Europe and Russia at the time. She had long contested the nature of war and the pursuit of conquest through her close studies of the Greek and Roman Empires and was clearly trying to discern the hidden forces that were at work in Europe at that time.

By the time she returned to France, Simone Weil had undergone the first of what was to become a series of major life transformations. She spoke strongly and critically about developments in Germany. She had also come to understand the tyrannical nature of Stalin's rule in Russia. She saw the similarity of what was happening in both countries and described Stalin's programs as "indistinguishable from the fascist program."

Her judgement was confirmed in a disastrous meeting with Leon Trotsky at around that time. She came to realise that truly revolutionary change did not rest on the implementation of political programs based on theories of history and class structure, but on the need to consciously direct educational programs towards the development of a capacity for attention and critical thinking. In her later writings, she urged educators to work towards the creation of conditions that would enable "enough room, enough freedom to plan the use of one's time, the opportunity to reach ever higher levels of attention, some solitude, some silence."

Weil came to accept that despite her intellectual understanding of the forces that acted through history, she remained largely in the dark regarding how most people actually lived and worked. In 1934, she left the academic theatres of Paris and began working as a labourer building electrical components, and later, joined the assembly line at the Renault factory. Joshua Glenn reflects on her experiences:

"She was so traumatised by her experience of factory life . . . that she immediately abandoned any remaining romantic notions she'd had about the proletariat and her (or anyone else's) ability to help them. Oppression does not result in rebellion, she'd discovered, but in obedience and apathy - even in the internalisation of the oppressor's values."

Maggie Ross offers her own view of that particular time in the life of Simone Weil:

"Her own experience with manual work broke her. In her vulnerability, she identified with others who were also despised and rejected, although doubtless for different reasons. Through her experience of work and of the world's contempt for fragility she strengthened her passion for truth, justice, and the respect of the human person."

Her time in the factories made her aware of the deeper levels of oppression that supported industrial civilisation: "Things play the role of men, men the role of things. There lies the root of the evil." She witnessed directly how the methods of industrial production had stripped many individuals of the capacity to develop the skills that enabled them to engage personally and creatively in their daily activities. She came to understand that factory workers were victims of new forms of enslavement where their workplace activities were largely determined by machines.

Having put aside the thought that universal human freedom could be won through a workers' rebellion, Weil was now ready to test the notion that armed struggle offered a way of liberation. When the newly elected Spanish Popular Front was attacked by General Franco and the Spanish military forces in July 1936, Weil - along with numerous other European socialists - went to Spain to join the Republican cause. In a dramatic but bizarre and ultimately impotent gesture, she took up arms. Joshua Glenn describes what followed:

"The frail, near-sighted intellectual joined a unit of anarchists, was issued a rifle and almost immediately put her foot into a pan of boiling oil. Her ever-protective parents, lurking just over the border, yanked her to safety. Dismayed by the atrocities she'd seen her own side commit, Weil was confirmed in her pacifism."

Simone Weil's attention progressively moved away from overtly political activity and more towards active reflection on the metaphysical dimensions of human life. She immersed herself in a study of the Gnostics, of Buddhism and Taoism, the writings of Pythagoras and his school, and Homer's Iliad. She was particularly drawn to the Bhagavad Gita and taught herself Sanskrit in order to read it in the original.

Throughout this time, she was plagued by blinding headaches and episodes of extreme fatigue that made it impossible to work. She was later to write: "For 10 years it has been such, and accompanied by such a feeling of exhaustion that my attempts at concentration and intellectual work were more often than not as devoid of hope as those of a man condemned to death awaiting execution the next day." Simone Weil is careful to make a distinction between suffering and what she terms affliction, a state that she was intimately familiar with:

"Just as truth is a different thing from opinion, so affliction is a different thing from suffering. Affliction is a device for pulverising the soul; the man who falls into it is like a workman who gets caught up in a machine. He is no longer a man but a torn and bloody rag on the teeth of a cogwheel."

Weil sublimated such experiences of pain and limitation and used them as a means of joining empathically with the pain of the world, and eventually, with the Passion of Christ.

Soon after, she was to be shaken in ways that she could never have anticipated. Three separate events completely altered her understanding of the world and her place in it. The first occurred in Portugal after an especially debilitating series of migraines. She found herself in a small fishing village at the time of a celebration for the patron saint of the village. She describes the event:

"It was the evening and there was a full moon over the sea. The wives of the fishermen were, in procession, making a tour of all the ships, carrying candles and singing what must certainly be very ancient hymns of a heart-rending sadness. Nothing can give any idea of it. I have never heard anything so poignant unless it were the song of the boatmen of the Volga. There the conviction was suddenly borne in upon me that Christianity is pre-eminently the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and I among others."

Despite the fact that she had lived as a secular Jew, and had earlier in her life made a conscious decision not to pray, having considered the notion of God to be "a problem the data of which could not be obtained here below", she unexpectedly found herself drawn into an engagement with the ageless suffering of all human communities. Despite her life-long tendency to keep herself separate from all groups, she found herself in mystical union with the larger and invisible body of humanity who lived within the universal reality of oppression and suffering.

In 1937, she experienced a second revelation while in Assisi. She writes: "There, alone in the little twelfth-century Romanesque chapel of Santa Maria degli Angeli, an incomparable marvel of purity where Saint Francis often used to pray, something stronger than I was compelled me for the first time in my own life to go down on my knees."

Her final epiphany occurred a year later, again at a time when she was suffering near-intolerable pain. Weil spent 10 days at Solesmes in France attending the liturgical services held in local churches between Palm Sunday and Easter Tuesday. During that time, she underwent an Ignatian transformation in which "the thought of the Passion of Christ entered my being once and for all." It was then that, in her own words, "Christ himself came down and took possession of me."

For most of her short life, Simone Weil felt intensely the unsatisfactory nature of earthly life. Even as a child, she had identified with the pain and privation of young French soldiers mired in the battle fields of Europe. Despite her own relatively comfortable circumstances - her father was a doctor - as soon as she had won her first freedoms, she actively took on the cause of the poor and of unemployed workers. She had directed her incandescent intelligence to writers who offered an analysis of the causes of poverty and oppression and the means of overcoming it, but found their suggested solutions served only to replace one form of oppression with another.

As she gradually retreated towards ideals that lay far beyond the messy domains of human existence, she never abandoned her quest to articulate the nature of the pathologies of power that had perennially thwarted human aspirations for peace, fairness and justice.

And despite her own encounters with the ineffable in Portugal, in Assisi and at Solesmes, she came to accept that the God invoked by so many throughout history was an absent God, a God removed from this world, though paradoxically, unlike the deceased God of Nietzsche, a God who could be humanly experienced.

Vincent Di Stefano D.O., M.H.Sc.
January 2011


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