2° parte
B. Why the impersonal (pars construens)
Obligations. If a person cannot claim as rights the goods of the soul, it has however the
obligation to follow the call of the truth in every circumstance of human life. It is responsible
of the direction that it gives to its view and its life. The responsibilities are not connected with
what is due, but on the debt of care that everyone contracts with life, with every other human
being and with cosmos. The sign that one didn’t fall in the traps of exaltation of the “ego” and
of the “us”, it is the responsibility that a person is able to assume toward the others. The
mutual care, fruit of a correct social feeling, is born from the impersonal: «Each one of those
who reached the impersonal, finds its own responsibility toward all human beings. That
responsibility to protect not the person, but all those fragile possibilities of the personal to pass
into the impersonal ... ».
From this formulation comes the Weil’s worry, different from the one of the personalists, to
articulate a Déclaration des obligations envers l’ être humain, as foundation of a right
Constitution. She wanted journalists, businessmen, judges and all people going to assume a
social position of power, to be forced to undersign such declaration: «Every man that has the
power to oppress or to deceive other men, should assume the obligation not to do it»145.
In Enracinement, Simone Weil will show that an obligation corresponds exactly to every
right, and that in order to delineate the lines of a social environment liveable for men and
women, it’s necessary to assure a satisfactory relationship among couples of equally necessary
contraries: obedience and authority, loneliness and social life, personal and collective
ownership, punishment and honour, truth and liberty of expression, equality and hierarchy,
social share and personal initiative, safety and risk, rooting in one’s own environment and
universal communication. Stressing only an aspect without the opposite correspondent pole is
a sin of simplification that gets inhuman results and is unworthy of the noble political art.
The defence from "us". The impersonal is not only a bank to ego’s delirium, but also to the
power of collectivity, that Simone distrusts as " platonic beast ". There is, in the human being,
a specific temptation of abdication to personal assignment, favoured by different assemblages
(group, party, Trade Union, Church…), when one delegates its own responsibility to a massive
ego, resulting from the sum of individuals induced to accustom themselves to a dominant
thought, to conform themselves to majority, to idolize a leader. We know that Simone herself
feared a lot this gregarious tendency as a typical temptation of group relationships. She
confessed that on the wave of a group she would have been able also to shout "Hi Hitler". For
this she didn't want any Party membership card and she was always careful to stay at proper
distance from the influence of collective fascinations that could alter the truth. Writing to P.
Perrin, she also connects this distrust with the Catholic environments: «There’s a Catholic
environment that is always ready to warningly welcome whoever enter it. Now I don't want to
be adopted by an environment, to live in an environment in which it is said "us" and to belong
to this "us", to feel me at home in a human environment, whatever it is. Saying "I don't want", I
express me badly, because I would like it: all this is very pleasant, but I feel that it is not for
me, I feel that for me it is necessary and that it is prescribed me to be alone, to be foreigner
and in exile in any human environment, without exception».
"Us" is not the impersonal but a swelling of ego. Escaping from the impersonal, it pursues
false heavens, sweet shelters, dreams of greatness and deliriums of power, denying the
assignment of truth. «Human being doesn't escape from collective but raising itself over
personal to penetrate in the impersonal. At that time there is something in this man, a particle
of his soul, on which nothing of collective can have any taking». There is a hard-working
and personal assignment that cannot be given up, that demands the consent to one’s proper
"vocation". It constitutes an unforgivable omission, a delegation of what is not delegable, the
most serious act of dishonesty to surrender oneself to society, to cultural fashions, to “what is
said", to the search of prestige, abdicating the fundamental assignment that gives taste and
sense to the whole existence.
The great mystical ones’ comparative study will graft on this attitude of fundamental
honesty. This study joins East and West in a whole great transversal stream and will confirm to
Simone the duty to go over personal and collective ones, over sublimed or drowned in society
ego: «The whole effort of mystics has always aimed to get that there is no more in their soul
some part that says "me". But soul’s part saying "us" is infinitely more dangerous».
The third one. Is the refusal of collective tout court a refusal of social one? Is there a
possibility of relationship over the imposition of the ego and the us? If a true relationship was
possible, Weil’s thought would be in strong contrast with the idea of active citizenship that we
have today and also with a Christianity that considers as sacred the friendship and as rightful
the construction of the so-called "civilization of love".
In Weil’s opinion the radical disenchantment on society is the premise of that
disenchantment that allows an authentic interpersonal relationship, which is possible when “I”
and “you” meet each other in a point that joins without confusing them. It results from this the
appeal to a third one that appears essential to a relationship between me and you, relationship
that is very close to XX century philosophies. Only taking root in a common being “I” and
“you” can realize that transcendence of their immediateness and can escape from the
temptation to practice a certain mastery on the other. The third one opens a horizon of
heterogeneous sense to the two, a horizon that appears as impersonal, that is a no-person.
From the point of view of language, the third person is the grammar form having the function
to express the no-person and that refers to an external objective referent one, something or
someone identifiable not as a specific person149. It therefore concerns with an absent, that can
also refer to a human entity, which however cannot have the self reflecting form because it is
always concerned with an objective trial, more reportable to an event than to a subject. The
third person escapes from personal pattern of first and second person; it is singular and plural
together, external to the plan of interlocution, moreover directly opposite to the intimacy of “I”
and “you”, so much that risks to separate the two ones and also to break the relationship, even
if it is dependent on them; in every case, it redefines the relationship, in a way that only a third
one can do between I and You.
Lévinas studied this theme and sustained that «the beyond from which the face comes from is
the third person», or indeed the originality of face, elusive regarding its origin, it complains
an irreducible diversity in comparison to a linear and binary relationship me and you. By
Lévinas, in fact, it is not enough to say that ego is not assimilable to “you”, because, however,
it risks to reduce the diversity to a bond that is not a real other one different from the subject.
Diversity cannot be a dissimilarity inside a similar reality, but it claims a heterogeneous level.
Roberto Esposito says that writing: "Result - but also presupposition - of this triangulation in
which every term is overhung, and at the same time displaced, from the precedence of the
other, it is a sort of bending of being that, also “face to face”, doesn't allow the interlocutors to
talk together in a very direct way, but it exposes them to the obliquity of a third term to which
"illeità” (that one) is the right name. This third one has, by Lévinas, a predominantly
negative meaning alluding to a divine presence as absence, so that such illeità is not placed
beside or in the middle, but just at the bottom of the two; it is their no-conjunction.
Also in Simone Weil’s opinion it is essential a metaphysical and ethical distance in order to
join individuals. In order to reach a true relationship, her conception of friendship, fed on
respect and on voluntary abstention, aims really to escape from the superficiality of conflictual
or sticky relationships destined to melt themselves with the same ease as when they took place.
This demand is more and more developed, thanks to the recovery of Greek and evangelical
sources alluding to a third one with a human-divine face.
Medium’s face. As S. Weil says to P. Perrin and to J. Bousquet, she attributes a boundless
importance to friendship: "Friendship for me is an incomparable good, without common
measure, a source of life, not in a metaphoric sense, but in a literal sense… friendship gives to
my thought all that life that doesn't come from God or from goodness of the world. You can
understand, therefore, how much benefit I had from your friendship". A good friendship
needs respect and modesty, virtues to connect with recognition of the mystery that surrounds
“ego” and “you”, as if nobody had the right to profane and to tear the veil that hides the
diversity of the other.
Starting from overcoming her adolescent turbulences, Simone Weil cultivates friendships
with the rigor of a pure love, not consumed, able to fondly take care and wait for other’s
rhythm, without any pretension. She feared a relationship that was a sort of mutual support or
of affectionate adhesion to other’s opinions just to agree and be kind with her friend: Amicus
Plato sed magis amica veritas. She held fundamental to avoid an “embrassons nous”
companionship ("Cursed is the man who trusts in human beings") and she was inflexible on the
rule that she gave herself, that is to always keep friendship at that level in which it feeds itself
of shared ideal, because only in this way it doesn't mutilate, but it strengthens, the aspiration to
the good.
This attitude has also been for her meaningful in relationship with the faith, as she
communicates to P. Perrin confiding him that her faith came directly from God: «My
friendship for you would have been for me a reason to refuse your message; I would have been
afraid of possibilities of error and illusion implicated by human influence in the field of divine
things».
She knew well that the feelings of gratitude and affection can induce to divert from one’s
own road and to sign a free delegation to the other, confusing friendship and truth. She was
more and more convinced that the true unity is only possible in God.
There is who, comprehensibly, reports Weil thought’s risk to ignore all social mediations
(which person's concept implies), especially in the last years. «In the 1943 S. Weil continually
postpones to "another world": “Only what comes from sky is susceptible to engrave a mark on
earth». Person left place to the impersonal, right to obligation, revolution to a folly love,
companion relationship to a divine friendship in God. On one side, therefore, friendship, and
on the other one, fear to do an idol of it.
Greek world is a fundamental reference for Simone for that problem. She makes reference to
Plato who, soaked of the Pythagorean doctrine, expresses the conviction, in the Filebo, that
relationship, association, friendship, justice are Gods’ gifts. «It is impossible that two human
beings are one, and nevertheless they meticulously respect the distance that separates them, if
God is not present in every one of them. The meeting point of parallel lines is at the
infinite». From the point of view of mathematics this reality is in the proportional average
between numbers and unity, expression of the divine mediation, that escapes any individualist
and collectivist reduction. The proportional average is, in fact, what Pythagoras considered the
key, the bridge between God and creation. The direct experience of Christ convinces Simone
that the true mediation is Christ, the proportional average between God and men who allows
the firm unity of them, accepting the difference. Community is not group, but – evangelically -
communion between people united by Christ. Unity is not empathic fusion, the result of
common collective recognition in a leader, the sticky often devastating group, but it refers,
even though defective and indeterminable, to that average-person-divine, in which human
beings know to be able to find themselves, without injuring their individuality.
"Trinitarian" friendship. Friendship, anchor of salvation from the shipwreck in the
collective, takes root therefore in a third-middle, that appears, in different levels - language,
justice, institution… - as impersonal to people, as objective in comparison to the subjects and
to those souls ready to receive the miracle of unity as Christ’ presence: «Christ has perhaps
wanted to underline Christian friendship when he said: "When two or three among you will be
gathered in my name, I will be in their midst ". A pure friendship is an image of the original
and perfect friendship of the Trinity, that is the same essence of God". The promise to make
friendship a privileged place of Christ’s presence on earth, makes it a sacrament: "It can be
thought - Simone underlines - that a pure friendship, as well as love to the neighbour,
contains something like a sacrament".
Friendship reveals, in that case, a particular trinitarian analogy because the third one is a
living Person in which the one and the other recognize themselves, that holds them united and
distinct, move them away and join them. The new commandment given by Jesus aims to the
realization of such a trinitarian friendship. This commandment goes over love to God and to
the neighbour, because it not only represents the invitation to love, but to a circularity of love
that, in the Trinity, the theologians call "pericoresis": "Love one another as I have loved
you". To the friendship competes the perfect equality and respect of differences: "Equality
among the persons of the Trinity. Not that the Child is not, in a certain sense, less than his
Father; but also, in another sense, He is more. Prometheus and Zeus". Such model postpones
to a mysterious harmony of personal and impersonal, aspects that, in the reality of the things,
are hardly compatible. Every other way of conceiving relationship among impersonal and
personal results fallacious for the fact that it expires in the mere objectivity or in the
personalistic exaltation.
It isn’t possible to reach the Trinitarian level without the cross, living the contradiction
without wish to escape, too hastily resolving it because every attempt of synthesis, if it is not
God, is just a deceptive consolation. Monotheism therefore cannot be other but Trinitarian if it
wants to avoid fictitious unity: "The belief in a unique God, without distinction of Persons
neither of principals of what is good and what is evil has as a consequence or as a cause, in
every case it is inseparable from the moral blindness which was found by the Hebrews. Unity
of contraries is badly done".
In the Trinity, differences are not destined to disappear, not to be annulled reducing
everything to one; the separation, therefore the negative one, is the fertile wound, that makes
possible a well done unity. In the Trinity, in fact, there is a perfect cohabitation of personal and
impersonal, negation of the fusion and triumph of the unity in the dynamics of love. Similarly
relationships cannot have that weak and instrumental bonds, false fusions, dependences and
oppressions, if they don’t get that middle that joins, above the horizontality of “I” and “you”.
Impersonal obedience. Obedience, other key word of Weil’s universe, would be pure
oppression if it were not in connection with a Trinitarian concept. By Weil, this virtue, much
exploited by every typology of power, doesn't concern only with human nature; on the
contrary, it concern with “to have to be” of human being. Paradoxically, she suggests that God
is obedience and therefore He obeys both his relationship with world and, somehow, his inside
Trinitarian relationship. Being himself retired from the world and having introduced in the
world autonomous laws of development, He continually has to allow that the world is what it
is, and not other. Accordingly: "The same power of God is also obedience".
In other terms, because obedience and omnipotence are not contradictory, Omnipotence
should be obedience to the creative love and love should be nothing other than obedient power.
It always concerns therefore with love, that demands to leave room for an objective reality that
is different from oneself and leave room for another person, obeying the ways and the rhythms
of her being. Human being doesn't fulfil itself strengthening its strength, its fullness, but
directing, freely, all of its resources to the impersonal truth, essential precondition to enter into
the Kingdom. "What, in the man, is the true image of God, it is something that is connected
with the fact to be person, but that it is not the person. Rather it is the faculty to abdicate to be
person. It is obedience".
The concept of obedience postpones to the no-acting human action, corresponding to the noacting
God’s action (God, in fact, leaves His Child at a cruel fate). It’s the same as if both, God
and man, lived the law of the dynamic personal-impersonal, which means to act with
responsibility and at the same time to freely obey to the necessity.
Order of the world. When we experience necessity, that dominates the nature and that
appears as Leopardi’s stepmother (Tsunami, eruption of the volcano, earthquakes…), it is
difficult to think to a personal God. Similar unpredictable events are as a shock that disarranges
every sense of history and faith. World’s order appears cruelly and absurdly impersonal as the
fate of Greeks, to which Gods and men were subordinated and that conducts all of them where
they wouldn’t like. They demand only the consent and the abandonment of human beings to
be brought where they would not like. This absence of acceptable explanations, this way of
being at the mercy of the irrational is the main problem of Greeks, who seamed to be for Weil
like teachers when they expressed questions without giving answers in front of a fate that
makes fun of people, that overwhelms kings, tyrants, simple people, in impersonal way and
through tragic events. In these cases: "Intelligence of necessity is an imitation of creation".
God, the Creator, allows the creation to exist according to proper laws and human beings to
act according to proper views, also in contrast with Him, when instead God maintains in life
every existing reality as a continuous creation. The mystery is that the hiding of God doesn't
mean his absence. Imitating world’s order, the inactive passivity of natural things, means to
abandon the ambition to understand, to manage one’s own life and nature and to accept to set
the questions without getting answers, to wish a harmony that is not there, to ask love even if
there is no one who satisfy it, suspended in the words not said by God. Consent is inside the
intersection between necessity and love: necessity, because it’s impossible to understand
what happens, love because to accept this it’s necessary to annihilate oneself and to stick to a
sort of not perspective, in which, somehow, one assumes the divine point of view. It doesn't
properly deal with "annihilation”, but with vertical transport in a superior level of being".
Weil is interested in the coexistence of intelligibility and not intelligibility, of rationality and
apparent non sense of world’s order, specially when God seems to be irremediably absent,
although to faith’s eyes this absence is just apparently and temporarily. In those moments
human being has the possibility to love without any manifest or hidden interest. It happens the
contrary in the miracles with which it is asked to break the world’s order for personal interests.
Weil, the great admirer of the impersonal and universal love, refuses every idea of God that
reveals a personal predilection, as in the case of the Hebrews. She had chosen the last ones and
she couldn’t bear that it existed a people for definition "chosen", and still worse, that herself
was part of it. The concepts of election, and any extraordinary intervention to advantage a
single person or a single people, are gratifying, but they don't seem her compatible with a true
God, that reaches all creation, as well as the sun light.
The choice to love the world’s order just as it is represents the need not to build a stopgap
God but to learn to read the most extraordinary miracles, as real fruit of true charity: "An alms
giving for pure charity is a miracle greater than walking on waters". Equally the prayer
should not be a demand in order to get something for oneself, but "the only resource of the
beautiful art, of the really bright and new scientific discoveries, of philosophy that goes really
toward the wisdom, of really benevolent love for others; this kind of prayer toward God
constitutes the true prayer".
Events. Every event brings trace of truth, because it induces the soul to accept both what is
in its favour of it and what is not. Events don’t proceed from a personal choice, they are
imposed from outside. The ancients adopted the concept of ataraxia to face the impossibility to
govern the events. Every one must live the life in the way it is, without subjugating it to dreams
and objectives, to ego’s Pindaric flights: to be what one is called to be, "as an emerald is
green". This disposition implicates the acceptance of world’s order and allows to assimilate
believers and atheists who have no experience of God as a Person, but who seek the good in all
honesty and conform themselves to it: "All those who have pure love for the others and the
acceptance of world’s order, included bad luck, all the people, even if live and die apparently
atheists, they are surely saved. Those that perfectly possess these two virtues, even if they live
and die as atheists, they are holy. When one meets this kind of men, it is useless to want to
convert them. They are all converted, although not visibly; they have been regenerated from
water and spirit, even if they have never been baptized; they have eaten the bread of life, even
if they are never communicated".
To a believing eye events allow to see the shining face of a personal hidden God, as if they
have got an extra-value, due to the message that they communicate: "Events of life, all without
exception, are for convention signs of God’s love, as the Eucharistic bread is flesh of Christ.
But a convention with God is realer than any other realities. God establishes with his friends a
conventional language. Every event of life is a word of this language. Such words are all
synonyms, but, as it happens in the beautiful languages, each one of them has its particular
specification, each one is untranslatable. The common sense of all these words is: "I love you".
One drinks a glass of water. The water is God’s "I love you". One stays for two days in the
desert without finding nothing to drink. The withering of throat is God’s "I love you". God is
like an importunate woman always close to her lover and whispering to his ear for times,
without stopping: "I love you - I love you - I love you…". The beginners in learning this
language believe that only some of these words mean "I love you". Those that know the
language know that these words contain only one meaning. God doesn't have any words to tell
his creatures: "I hate you". In a certain sense the creature is more powerful than God. Man can
hate God but God cannot hate man. This impotence makes Him an impersonal person. He
loves, not in the same way I love, but as an emerald is green. He is "I love". And also me, if I
were in the state of perfection, I would love as an emerald is green".
Time. Also the acceptance of time is a necessity for human beings. It demands a sort of
inactivity, similar to that of objects abandoned in the water and that float according to their
specific weight. God put between itself and creation the impersonality of time on which he has
no power. Hope would only be a superficial optimism if it didn't implicate the acceptance of
such impersonality and of patient waiting for spending time moment by moment, until the
consummation and death. Nor man neither God can make not happen what is happened.
Wanting to underline the impersonal dimension of time, Weil fights every naivety to have a
reward or a deposit on plans of magic progress. It is not correct and even not possible to
manipulate the future: "What to ask and hope more?... When we know it, even hope becomes
useless and senseless. The only thing to hope is the grace for us not to disobey. The other
events are up to God and don't concern with us". Also God is victim of time that He created
and He submits his logic of love to the impersonal logic of history: "God waits as a mendicant
that is standing, steady and silent in front of someone who perhaps will give him a piece of
bread. Time is this waiting… Stars, mountains, sea, all that tells us of time reveals the
supplication of God".
The meeting between man and God happens into the time, although it goes beyond it: "God
and humanity are like two lovers who mistakenly go to different places for their appointment.
Both of them are there before the time, but they’re in two different places and they wait, they
wait, wait. He is standing, immovable, during the eternity of times. She is distracted and
impatient. Unfortunate woman, she gets fed up and goes away! Because the two different
places are the same point in the fourth dimension".
For the believers the acceptance of the cross of the time represents to stress total reception of
God’s wish, with the attention not to expire in the disheartening resignation, that kills the
initiative because, to faith’s eyes, there is love behind impersonality of time: "The
abandonment in which God leaves us is His way of caressing us. Time… is the same touch of
His hand. It’s the abdication through which He let us exist. He stays away from us, because if
He approached us, He would make us to disappear".
Beauty. Weil left us some deep meditations on beauty. We are interested, in this context, in
conjugating beauty and impersonal: "Truth and beauty - she wrote - live this circle of the
impersonal and anonymous things. What is sacred in the science is truth. In the art, beauty is
sacred. Truth and beauty are impersonal… Perfection is impersonal"177. Beauty is the trap of
impersonal truth and, at the same time, the conjunction between impersonal truth and God’s
"smile", that winks to man through the world.
In the Greek-Roman myth of Persephone, very meditated by Weil, truth comes from Sky and
it is out of the course of that girl, to point out that beauty and truth cannot be human goods, but
they have celestial origins. Persephone, Demeter’s daughter, mother of the earth, gathers
flowers and this symbolizes the temptation to consider the world beautiful in itself, as it was
the definitive world, but a God abducts her and this is to underline the revelation of a divine
world through an independent action on intelligence and on human wish. God looks for her
soul to abduct it, to take it away from the world. God looks like a seducer of the soul to abduct
her, to detach her from the world and to attract her to itself. God often appears as a seducer
who tries everything to get the consent of the beloved one. God’s weakness is here, in his
depending on the creature: He needs creature’s consent to love it. In the Homeric story
Demeter infinitely suffers for the abduction of her daughter, so much to react preventing the
earth to be fertile and to the wheat to sprout. Therefore Persephone has to come back to the
world not to make it to perish of sterility. But the divine bridegroom, to make sure himself that
Persephone will not forget the sky, makes her eat, in a hidden way, with cleverness, a grain of
pomegranate: "God has to allow that soul to return in the nature; but before, as a surprise, He
makes her eat a grain of pomegranate that is the consent that the soul gives to God even
without being conscious of it … and nevertheless it decides forever its destiny. It is the wheat
of mustard to which the Christ compares the divine kingdom, the smallest of wheat, but that
later will become a tree on which the birds will take place".
Joy. Joy, that man looks for, is over pleasure. It implicates impersonal one as well, neither
more neither less than bad luck. Simone Weil wrote to her friend J. Bousquet: "I am convinced
that bad luck from one side, and from the other the intense joy as total and pure adhesion to the
perfect beauty, from the moment they both implicate loss of personal existence, they are the
only two keys through which it’s possible to enter the pure world, the breathable and real world
"179. Therefore joy springs from attention to look for, to wait and to recognize the good as a
gift. It is not good to pursue it as a primary objective – the same is for love - since human task
consists only - as a student try to work out a mathematical operation or to prove a theorem of
geometry - in avoiding all of what can divert from concentration on the true solution. Joy is not
the result of a planned action.
Weil, as it’s known, has manifested a certain fundamentalism in the paradox of a joy tied up
to truth, that has as a precondition the decreasing of ego. Her perspective is a bell of alarm in
comparison to the spasmodic exaltation of pleasure and an invitation to those who don’t want
to be satisfied with false heavens to draw to a beautiful in itself truth, desirable, perfect in the
joy and in the pain. For her innate honest disposition she doesn't want "to cuddle" the desire:
“Give value just to what is transcendent, to what of myself is unknown to me, what is not me,
and to nothing else, without any exception". The same attitude we can find in Pascal: "Le
moi est haïssable". G. Thibon shows that this demolition of ego is a brighter transparency of
God and "for this transparency, in order to confer to the impersonal one salvation and
magnetism coming from a being unique among everybody. So the radiant face of that young
English man who revealed to Simone Weil the sense of the real presence of God in the
Eucharist". That means that person gets endless dignity if and because it welcomes and
makes to shine through the impersonal one, that is the super-personal that the lives in the
person, rather than its negation.
Only if the human being is able to live this impersonal, he can produce great works and enjoy
of a deep joy, not bought at the sales. He has to decide to attain the divine one that comes to
him with flashes of unexpected wisdom.
Personal-impersonal God. Only an impersonal God can be the absolute Good. He cannot be
for his nature the irascible and astute sovereign (an almighty Creon), that applies the categories
of friend and enemy to condemn all those who are not aligned with his truth. The
demythologizing of God is the other front of the post-modern disenchantment, that prevents
from making of God an idol to the same extent of a human being. The “teachers of suspect”
have taught a calm disenchantment in comparison to the anthropomorphic God, contributing to
unmask the lies that sell off for truth idols such as economic conditionings (Marx), libido
(Freud), wish of power (Nietzsche). That man’s incapability to conceive God independently
from humans conditionings, forces to accept to the impersonality of God as to someone to
reach, freeing oneself as much as possible the conditionings of the psyche, of unconscious, of
affairs and passions. It is impossible to reach God doing as someone who wants to touch sky
just jumping. It needs instead to wait: it is the same God who reveals himself.
When, in the juvenile notes, Simone Weil studies Spinoza, she recognizes herself in the
impersonality of the Spinoza’s being and asks: "Why is Spinoza reproached to be atheistic?…
vulgar attributes: justice, omnipotence, goodness come from the fact that one thinks God as a
person. But it is necessary to conceive the relationship between God and his modalities not as
two objects (space-time-cause). Spinoza shows that it’s possible to talk about God in the same
way we talk about the being - since the only definition of God is being"183. The risk of the
personal God is to manipulate Providence, the risk of the impersonal God is making a think of
God, which is Spinoza’s risk. Accordingly: "It is necessary to love the impersonal God
through a personal God (and behind still God, the one and the other) for fear to conceive him
as a thing, what sometimes happens to Spinoza".
The expression "Personal-impersonal" translates the not eliminable antinomy, an
unsolvable tension among the two poles, with a preferential underline for the impersonal one at
every levels, philosophical-metaphysical, ethical and theological. From one side to preserve
such open antinomy assures the honesty of mind, from the other one it alludes to the possible
harmony of the contrary ones (opposites?) in the person. This is the reason why the word
person cannot be separated from the impersonal without producing illusions. It’s important to
underline that it doesn't deal with eliminating this term from the vocabulary, and Simone Weil
tells it clearly: "The term person is properly applied to God and also the term of impersonal".
From the point of view of human being, Simone Weil was convinced that: "It’s impossible to
go over a certain point along the street of perfection if God is thought only as personal. It’s
necessary to assimilate him to an impersonal perfection".
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Simone Weil
Simone Weil
Congresso internazionale di Prospettiva Persona
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