Nature's Miracle

Here lay the real problem, and one that only came home to Weil when, in an effort to live up to and to live out her ethical vision, she went to work with those she saw at the time as most clearly as of the class of those “who obey”: oppressed, menial, piece-working factory labourers. In this decision and project, she meant to place herself “on the side of the oppressed,” to “feel with them,” and so to understand and to act. Here she would live—and in living, demonstrate—the fundamental penetrative point of the ethical, of obligation, in (and into) the realm of force.

What happened, however, was that she found—in others and in herself—something that seemed to tear the realm of force and the ethical life irretrievably apart: she discovered that suffering that is affliction (malheur, literally “calamitous misfortune”). The suffering “seared the soul.”

It was affliction that turned her moral philosophy away from the conventional and that led her to speak of ethical life in religious terms; and it was affliction that made, or allowed, her to see that what made a human being sacred, what made them the kind of being whose suffering counted, was no ascriptive empirical fact about them, no matter how essential to their “personality,” but was, rather, the impersonal in them.

Affliction was suffering that robbed its bearer of all dignity, both in the eyes of others and in their own eyes. It left them “mutilated,” valueless, worthless. It involved the twinned and catastrophic impact of physical pain (which might be simply the fear of such pain), and social humiliation, social degradation. Affliction, she wrote in a letter to Father Perrin, “takes possession of the soul and marks it through and through with its own particular mark, the mark of slavery,” and it was what she found, in her co-workers and so in herself, as they laboured for Alsthom and Renault. “The affliction of others entered into my flesh and my soul… There I received forever the mark of slavery” (WG 66-67).