Assumptions of the problem from evil

While versions of this argument vary, most of them assume that the following three things must hold true on traditional theism:

1. 1. We should expect a perfectly good being to prevent creaturely suffering as far as it can do so without thereby giving up some greater good (where ‘greater good’ is very broadly construed).

2. 2. For any particular instance of creaturely suffering, an all-powerful being could have prevented it.

3. 3. Suffering (broadly construed) is bad/evil/to be prevented.

Assumption 1, held widely by both theistic and sceptical philosophers of religion, is often the turning point in the literature, upon which arguments are made. Eleanor Stump (Reference Stump1985, 58), writing in defence of the classical conception of God in light of the existence of evil, admits, ‘if a good God allows evil, it can only be because the evil in question produces a benefit for the sufferer and one that God could not produce without the suffering’. Assumption 2 seems to follow from a standard definition of ‘omnipotence’: maximally powerful, able to do anything that can possibly be done. At the very least, assumption 2 seems trivially true in the sense that God could have chosen to not create creatures who could suffer in the first place.

Importantly though, these claims (and primarily the first two) have not lacked their challengers. The body of literature devoted to defending the existence of God against the problem of evil – arguments generally referred to as ‘theodicies’ – have often taken at least one of these assumptions to task. Marilyn Adams’s influential Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Reference Adams1999) argues explicitly against the first assumption, on the basis that God lacks moral obligations to his creation. Without such obligations to discharge, a perfectly good being should not be expected to prevent each preventable instance of evil done to creatures. Further, she argues that being perfectly loving, rather than requiring preventing all instances of suffering, only requires that God provide his creatures with an existence that is, ultimately, good. From here, Adams argues for the unique position of Christian theism to fulfil this requirement. Peter van Inwagen, in his (Reference van Inwagen2006) Gifford lectures, rejects the first assumption for similar reasons. The third assumption – that creaturely suffering is intrinsically bad and, therefore, demands prevention from any perfectly good being who could prevent it – is almost certainly the most widely accepted of the three assumptions among all contributors to the debate. It seems difficult, perhaps even callous, to question whether suffering, pain, and the worst instances of human misery, could be anything other than intrinsically bad. To say otherwise would, in fact, seem to be the equivalent of accepting a kind of radical scepticism about our perceptions of things – specifically, our moral intuitions and convictions about how we ought to treat people.

Yet, Weil’s approach to the topics of God, evil, and suffering can help us radically re-frame the problem of evil, undermining (to some extent) all three of these commonly shared assumptions. Additionally, this Weil-inspired picture undermines these assumptions while still recognising, perhaps better than anyone, the horrific depths of human suffering, and the unfathomable immensity of the love of God for each person. In thinking through Weil’s remarks, we must begin where she always begins: with the metaphysics.

Platonic axiarchism

Weil was a ‘constant reader of Plato’Footnote ³ and extremely proficient in Greek from the age of twelve. It is Plato whom she most credits with her conversion to Christianity, and her taste for his worldview comes into sharp relief in parts of her writing that, for example, laud mathematics as the ‘study of the interwoven fabric of finite and infinite’ (Weil Reference Weil1970, p. 5), echoing her understanding of the Greek picture that mathematics ‘was a theology’ (ibid., p. 80.). It would not be an exaggeration to say that Weil considered Platonism itself to be a proto-Christianity, as argued in her esoteric work Intimations of Christianity among the Greeks.

The Platonic influence is evident as she works out her metaphysics throughout her journals as well. Yet, her metaphysical views are no mere reiteration of the historical Christian Platonists. Indeed, Weil seemed to care relatively little for figures like Augustine and Origen, and she read and cited them for apparently only scholarly reasons rather than reasons of personal admiration (Springsted Reference Springsted, Doering and Springsted2004, p. 210). She sought to join her Platonic picture of reality with some of the mystical views of other religious traditions; in doing so, she created a unique picture of the metaphysics of God and creation that is deeply mystical and Platonic, thoroughly un-Aristotelian, and contains a complex mass of theological implications.

One way of understanding Weil’s metaphysics is as involving a kind of ‘axiarchism’. Axiarchism is the metaphysical view which holds, broadly, that what explains the existence of everything is that its existence is good. Axiarchism – sometimes also known as ‘axiarchy’, as below – has been taken, in modern and contemporary literature, to come from or entail the idea that we exist in the best possible world. Derek Parfit writes:

On its surface, axiarchism seems straightforwardly false in a way that is almost silly: it can’t be true, because so many terrible things exist! But being so classically situated, it is unlikely that Weil held to Parfit’s style of axiarchism – that the world must be (in an evaluative sense) the best way it could possibly be. A more compelling kind of axiarchism can be understood through the lens of Platonic metaphysics.

In his Republic, Plato’s Socrates describes a form that is above – and decidedly different from – all of the other forms: the form of the Good. He writes, ‘[N]ot only do the objects of knowledge owe their being known to the good, but their existence and being are also due to it; although the good is not being, but something yet beyond being, superior to it in rank and power’ (Republic, Reference Reeve2004 509b5). Unlike the form of Triangle, where participation in the form of Triangle grants some degree of triangularity, participation in the form of Good is the origin of being itself. Plato equates goodness and existence – or at least understands them as co-extensive. Something has being to the extent that it participates in the form of Good. This is, of course, not to say that Plato failed to recognise badness, disasters, and so on. Rather, Plato (or, Plato’s Socrates, as he is commonly read) understands ‘objects of knowledge’ (that is, objects, rather than forms or ideas) to exist in varying degrees. There is a sense, for the Socrates of the Republic, in which the well-built house has more being than the poorly built one.

This is, of course, not a universally agreed upon reading of Plato, but it is one that has existed for a long time, influencing the ‘deprivation accounts’ of evil endorsed by Plotinus, Augustine (Reference WilliamsConfessions, book VII; Reference OutlerEnchiridion, chapter 11), Aquinas (Reference AquinasSumma Theologiae, first part, question 49, Article 1), and Weil. She writes:

This passage helps us to understand Weil’s discomfort with giving an ‘ontological description of God as divine “object”’ (Dupre Reference Dupré, Doering and Springsted2004, 15). What ‘exists’, what there is, seems to depend on who is asking the question. Creatures like us exist as a ‘void’ of being, through divine absence, and occupy a realm that God, by definition, could not. All of this is confusing, of course. Let me try to explain what it means.

Divine retraction

Although Weil’s most obvious influences are the pre-Socratic and Classical Greeks, she also draws on the mystical traditions from Judaism and Hinduism; for example, her picture of creation is most likely taken from the Lurianic Kabbalah – in particular, the Tzimtzum. Isaac ben Solomon Luria, a sixteenth-century rabbi and Jewish mystic, was responsible for many influential Kabbalistic works that appear to have been important to Weil. One of the main pillars of his worldview is the doctrine of Tzimtzum, which means something like ‘retraction’ or ‘withdrawal’. According to Tzimtzum, ‘to create the world God first had to make room for it by contracting himself’ (Goldschmidt and Lebens Reference Goldschmidt and Lebens2020, 517). God, conceived of as infinite (En Sof), cannot exist as infinite if something additional exists. To create, therefore, requires God to shrink himself, leaving a void in which things may be created.

Goldschmidt and Lebens (Reference Goldschmidt and Lebens2020) describe the traditional understanding of the Tzimtzum as entailing the following: ‘God’s omnipotence must have literally contracted, so as to make room, in logical space, for the creation.’ But, they object, ‘This is to water down one’s theism – by stripping God, even if only temporarily, of his omnipotence’ (p. 517). To account for such an unpalatable outcome, they argue for ‘radical Hasidic idealism’, contending that God did not really create anything at all, but that ‘creation’ is part of God because it is all ideas in God’s mind.

Weil’s discussion of divine hiddenness reveals the extent to which she was influenced by the Jewish mystical tradition (Hart Reference Hart and Rebecca Rozelle-Stone2017, p. 44).Footnote ⁴ She writes, ‘God could only create by hiding himself. Otherwise there would be nothing but himself’ (Weil Reference Weil1947, p. 38.) As part of creation, humans are for Weil essentially this kind of void: existing in the way that shadows can exist as an absence of light. To create anything at all, then, requires an act of divine ‘abandonment’ of the world to ‘inert matter’ – absence that allows the conditions for independent existence (Weil Reference Weil1970, p. 100.) On this feature of Weil’s thought, Vető (Reference Vető1994) writes, ‘For God the act of creation was not an expansion of self, but was much more a renunciation or abdication. This universe is an abandoned kingdom; its price is the withdrawal of God, and its very existence is the cause of separation from God.’

This relationship between creator God and creature, at the most foundational level, sounds at first unhelpfully mystical. Yet, there are examples within our own physical world that can help us understand the concept a bit better. Take the following example. If the whole world, every corner of it, were perfectly illuminated, then in order to create a distinction, light would have to be prevented from reaching certain areas. That then allows for a distinction between the illuminated and the unilluminated. We can even reify these places linguistically by calling them ‘shadows’. Shadows are nothing more than ‘places where light is blocked’, and unless you are Peter Pan, you cannot pin down a shadow, outrun it, or affect it in any way except by shining light on it. The light can only affect the shadow by destroying it. Do shadows exist? Of course, they do. But what their existence consists in is an absence. For the shadow, light does not exist, and vice versa. Light is a shadow’s anti-thesis. The kind of existence a shadow has is, ultimately, a testament to and revelation of the light (Sorensen Reference Sorensen2008).

This is not a perfect analogy. Nor would be the example of bubbles in the water as pockets of waterlessness. Nor would be the example of holes. It is a helpful tool that only gets us so far. But through these examples we are able to slightly demystify how Weil understands what the relationship must be like between the God of classical (Platonist) theism and his creation. For Weil, the nature of this relationship radically affects what our assumptions of the world should be, given theism. Because we are the product of Divine kenosis – self-emptying – Weil writes, ‘God himself cannot prevent what has happened from having happened … It is the abdication by which he lets us exist. He stays far away from us, because if He approached He would cause us to disappear’ (Weil Reference Weil1970, 140).

On god and causes

Weil’s view of the created world is directly opposed to occasionalism, a picture of God’s relationship to worldly events popular among religious philosophers in the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions. Nicolas Malebranche’s view (Reference Malebranche and Robinet1958–1984) is perhaps the best-known example of pure occasionalism.Footnote ⁵ For the occasionalist, it is God who upholds the regularities in earthly events that we witness, by causing all of them with law-like consistency. Occasionalism sits on one extreme end of the spectrum of views on God’s relationship to causes in the created order. Weil’s view could be understood as occupying the opposite extremity.

Weil writes, ‘As regards direct causality, God’s power in this world is something infinitely small’ (Weil Reference Weil1970, 296.) For her, God exercises no causal agency in the world, putting her picture at odds not only with occasionalism, but also with the more standard picture of God’s actions in the world – namely, that the natural order proceeds as usual unless (in rare instances like miracles) God chooses to intervene.Footnote ⁶ One could be forgiven for reading Weil here as a kind of Christian deist, who conceives of God as the creator of the universe who steps back after initial creation to allow the universe run entirely on its own accord. In fact, this would be to deeply misunderstand the sense in which, for Weil, God lacks causal power in the world. The deistic picture of the world is deeply dualistic: the divine exists, creates the universe, yet both the divine and the universe can exist separately after initial creation. For Weil, no such dualism is possible. There is only God, and God-void. So, while this entails that God’s causal powers within creation (which is, for her, essentially God-void) are ‘infinitely small’, nevertheless creation is utterly dependent upon God along every dimension, at every moment.

Gravity and creation

Finally, understanding Weil’s metaphysics involves understanding her picture of creation. Here, Weil borrows the Hindu concept of prakrti (roughly, the embryonic state of material nature) as derived from the Bhagavad-Gita: ‘Prakrti … does everything – even good – even evil – both good and evil, everything. Mankind has no power whatever, yet he does have responsibility’ (The Notebooks of Simone Weil, p. 96). Unlike God, who is not bound by laws of necessity, in our realm of negation all that happens is determined by naturalistic causal relations. The Eternal cannot intervene in these relations. Weil’s God, in creating, creates a space that is off-limits to him. ‘God … must renounce unbounded freedom if a world determined and ordered by finite limits is to exist. … God lets his hands be tied, so to speak, and he himself does the tying’ (McCullough Reference McCullough2014, p. 86).

For Weil, God does not exert any direct control over the world or anything in it. ‘Gravity’ acts as a kind of catch-all term for the general laws of nature, and of cause and effect in particular. Rozelle-Stone and Davis (Reference Rozelle-Stone and Davis2023) offer the following description:

‘Gravity’ also connotes what she takes to be an effect of living in a world governed by such laws – an inclination to self-assertion, self-preservation, and the coercion of others, a set of natural human inclinations Weil ends up reifying under the concept of ‘force’. We are ruled by gravity. God is not. Insofar as being in the world entails that one is governed by the laws of the world, God is not in the world. Yet, the world has not been utterly resigned to the laws of gravity; there is another set of laws at work. Weil writes, ‘Creation is composed of the descending movement of gravity, the ascending movement of grace and the descending movement of the second degree of grace’ (Weil Reference Weil1947, p. 4.) Grace, for Weil, helps us find God in a world ruled by laws of gravity. But we will return to this a bit later.

Affliction

Insofar as Weil conceived of anything like a ‘problem of evil’, it might best be summed up here, again in Thibon’s editor’s introduction to Weil’s Gravity and Grace: ‘“How can we escape from that which corresponds to gravity in ourselves?” By grace alone. … Whereas gravity is the work of creation, the work of grace consists of “decreating” us, p. xxii.’ Here, Weil recognises a problem posed by evil, although she understands it as a more general problem of ‘gravity’, which is to say, the laws of physical nature (laws of cause and effect, which bring about pain and suffering), and the ways in which our physical world draw us toward self-assertion and violence (dispositions to exercise control and coercion over others). This is a problem for Weil, not just because of the badness of suffering, but because of the power these laws have to keep us from uniting with God. God’s ‘grace’ to humans, for Weil, is the provision of a path out of the state in which we exist as creatures; we can, if want to, acknowledge the means by which we exist independently of God (namely, that we exist in virtue of God’s withdrawal), and relinquish this independent existence. Humans can unite with God, Weil holds, by following a process of kenosis – self-emptying or renunciation – by which God brought them into being. This state, which she calls ‘the void’, is mediated by the experience of afflictions, a special class of sufferings that reveal the depths of human emptiness and misery and, thereby, mimic the moment of death (that is, the loss of all things).

It is the grace of God that allows us to endure the laws of gravity, not by overpowering these laws, but by allowing us to cease to be subject to them. This is not something that happens immediately or fully, and it requires that one cease, little by little, to be a subject at all. Meeting God fully requires that we accept the ‘void’, and accept the destruction of the internal and external self that afflictions bring through the experience of the void. For Weil, de-creation does not culminate in the complete and eternal destruction of the person; nor does it involve coming to see the self as ultimately illusory as, for example, a Buddhist worldview may affirm in the Buddhist doctrine of anattā. Rather, Weil says, ‘He whose soul remains ever turned toward God though pierced with a nail finds himself nailed to the center of the universe … at the intersection of creation and its Creator’ (Weil Reference Weil and Perrin1951, p. 38.) When we willingly give up our existence as a state of the absence of God we receive back paradoxical existence as a creation unified with God. Affliction, therefore, is God’s primary act of grace toward humans. Weil writes, ‘Grace fills empty spaces but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void’ (Weil Reference Weil1947, p. 10).

It should be made clear that afflictions are not, for Weil, a kind of useful plague sent down to humans by God in order to bring them to him. Recall that, on her understanding, God cannot tinker with creation the way that an engineer might tinker with her invention. God is to creation as light is to shadow, and where he enters in, we disappear into him. Affliction is, however, an inevitability of all who are living under the laws of gravity, revealing a ‘constant and irreducible [misery] which is as great as it can be in each man’ (ibid., 78), and gravity itself is an inevitability of a creation separate from God. So, while God’s absence in the world is the source of our afflictions, the afflictions are also our means of uniting with him. By allowing us to experience, and therefore become aware of, the absence of God, we are simultaneously made aware of God, and aware of the inverted spectrum of the created order. None of this is a necessary result of experiencing affliction, however; affliction is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the kenotic surrender of the self. Weil writes, ‘Affliction in itself is not enough for the attainment of total detachment. Unconsoled affliction is necessary. There must be no consolation – no apparent consolation. Ineffable consolation then comes down’ (ibid., 12).

Reframing the problem of evil: On initial creation

On Weil’s picture, God still chose to create, to ‘retract’ and leave a void that was separate from himself. Given the laws of gravity that would rule such a realm, perhaps Weil’s picture simply sets the stage for a different kind of problem of evil. Perhaps God still needs to be ‘bailed out’, as it were, on account of the initial decision to create. Further, Weil’s metaphysics seems to land a blow to God as well as humanity, since God is reduced (in a sense) to less than what God had been – a necessity for the kind of creation Weil has in mind. It may seem as though we still need a justification, or at least a story to tell, about why Weil’s God should decide to create at all. Everitt (Reference Everitt2004, p. 243) phrases the problem succinctly as follows:

The Neoplatonists, whose transcendent Good is impersonal, have no concept of the Good ‘deciding’ to create something. For Plotinus, ‘the One’ emanates Being by a principle of contemplation. Such emanation is not causal in a physical, diachronic sense; rather, the ‘contemplation’ by which all exists and all is united, stands as a timeless relation that the One bears to ‘the many’. Plotinus believed that the One’s contemplation of emanation is what makes the emanated objects what they are. Weil conceives of almost a mirror-image of Plotinus’ picture of creation. For Weil, the world is not created when being emanates from Being (as Plotinus held), but rather when Being withdraws to create a void. The objects of creation, then, are not beings emanated (or, rather, emanating) from the source of Being, but rather a void of being. From this, Weil maintains a kind of creation ex nihilo (albeit an atypical, heterodox one).

As a Christian, Weil presumably wanted to maintain that God willed to create – at least, she never said anything to the contrary. And if creation for Weil remains an intentional act, then this raises an obvious objection. If God cannot tinker with the details of creation then, realising the lack of control he would have over the experiences of his would-be creatures (and therefore the likelihood that it would be quite bad, at times), shouldn’t God have chosen not to create anything at all? (See Franklin Reference Franklin2022, p. 458.)

For the Lurianic Kabbalist, as well as the Plotinus-style Neoplatonist, this objection carries no weight; perhaps non-creation would have been better (in some sense of ‘better’) but, on these views, creation happens by necessity, continuously flowing out of the nature of the Divine One – not as an act of will. By contrast, the Christian view of creation typically holds that creation was intentional, not a product of necessity. Divine choice to create has traditionally been central to Christian orthodoxy, grounding the claims of the love of God for creation. Yet, in choosing to create a world that will contain, as Weil herself claims, the ‘maximum amount’ of suffering, has God not made a cruel, even unthinkable choice? In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan (an atheist) poses the following question to his brother Alyosha, who is living in a monastery and discerning a call to monasticism:

Ivan is here proposing a world that is wildly better than our own – only one single creature is tortured to death, in exchange for the eternal bliss of all others. This question deeply disturbs and disarms Alyosha who, eventually, must admit that he would not consent to the creation of this world.

Weil’s remarks on this particular topic are sparse, though she recognises the need to grieve the world that was created. She writes that when one prays the Lord’s Prayer, ‘one asks God’s forgiveness for our existence and one forgives him for causing us to exist’ (Weil Reference Weil1970, p. 296). Providing a theodicy, apologetic, or otherwise formal justification for the creation of the world is of no use to Weil; perfectly calculated rational trade-offs of pain for pleasure is, for her, no real perfection. Though she ultimately says little (or, little that is clear) about God’s initial creative act, what she does say indicates that divine creation must, at bottom, be an act of love. Weil writes, ‘God denied himself for our sakes in order to give us the possibility of denying ourselves for him. This response, this echo, which it is in our power to refuse, is the only possible justification for the folly of love of the creative act’ (Weil Reference Weil and Perrin1951, p. 145.) The word ‘folly’ is important here, signalling something characteristic of Weil’s picture of love: that love does not calculate and plan its moves, but is constantly bubbling over with the inclination to decrease so that the beloved other may increase. Creation as an act of love is not a foreign concept to us. The voluntary decision to have a child is often born of love – love for our partners and love for the children who do not yet exist. Similarly, bringing a child into the world requires a deep relinquishing of self – a kind of retraction. We have to get smaller, to become less a part of our own life, to make room for the new ones when they arrive. Yet, as O’Hear (Reference O’Hear2020) notes, the parent–child analogy is far from perfect. Weil is insistent that God ‘can only love himself. His love for us is love for himself through us’ (Weil Reference Weil1947, p. 32). Such a way of thinking would seem to belie a warped picture of parental love; parents’ love for their children ought to be ultimately toward the children themselves.

These are loose thoughts, difficult to pin down with rigour in a precise and analytical way. Yet, Weil appears to be doing much more than fitting the act of creation into a story that emotionally appeals to us by having a familiar narrative. Throughout her notebooks, Weil uses creation (in general, not merely special creation) as a model for demonstrating her theory of love. She writes, ‘For God, the Creation consisted not in extending himself but in withdrawing. He refrained from “commanding wherever he had the power.” Creation, the Passion, the Eucharist–always the same movement of withdrawal. This movement is love’ (Weil Reference Weil1970, p. 81). She continues a few pages later:

In the preceding sentences, she discusses this ‘consent’ as a non-forced ‘necessity’, again forcing the comparison to the Neoplatonists. Contrary to Plotinus’ One, however, the necessity with which God creates is love rather than impersonal indifference or compulsion. The connection of creation with love lies in the act of retracting the self. For Weil, Divine creation involves God’s retracting of his infinite self to make a void in which creation could dwell. Weil sees this sacrificial minimisation of the self as the core element of pure love, as well as a common feature among all acts of creation.

It is (Divine) love that she finds, not only compatible with, but one and the same as, ‘pure intelligence’. When God creates, it is both an act of love and a movement of the intellect by necessity, an act of ‘folly’ in that perfect infinitude becomes willingly finite. Weil wants to argue that there is something about creation (along with incarnation and the passion) which displays the essence of love. The essence of love for Weil is as follows: ‘The Father is creation of being, the Son is renunciation of being; this double pulsation is one single act which is Love or Spirit’ (Weil Reference Weil1970, p. 102). Love is characterized here as involving a double-movement that occurs simultaneously, of creation and abdication; growth and wilting; life and death. For Weil, these are opposites only superficially. At the level of ultimate reality, they are two sides of the essence of love.

Kierkegaard and the silence of love

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard describes his own version of a ‘double-movement’ which is strikingly similar to Weil’s picture of creation and retraction. In this section, I want to briefly describe Kierkegaard’s version as a way of helping to illuminate aspects of the Weilian account I discussed previously. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard, writing under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio, tells the following story: ‘[A] young lad falls in love with a princess, and this love is the entire substance of his life; and yet the relation is such that it cannot possibly be realized, that is, it cannot possibly be translated from ideality into reality’ (Reference Kierkegaard, Hong and Hong1983, p. 41 ). Kierkegaard is here describing a union-creating love: the knight’s love was the ‘entire substance of his life’, p. 41, making the impossibility of an earthly, physical union utterly unthinkable. For whatever reason (Kierkegaard does not elaborate), the Knight and Princess’s relationship could not be instantiated ‘in reality’ – that is, in the world we live in (Kierkegaard Reference Kierkegaard, Hong and Hong1983, p. 41). Silentio acknowledges that most people, if they found themselves in a similar situation, would respond by abandoning their love for the princess, writing off continued hope in the union as foolishness. Silentio harshly describes these people as, ‘the slaves of the finite, the frogs in the swamp of life’ (ibid., p. 41.) In other words, the person who cannot, or will not, continue to love the princess is stuck irremediably in the finite, rather than understanding his situation from the perspective of eternity. Silentio sees such a response as foolishness given the nature of the love – a totalising union in which the knight’s entire being is inextricably wrapped up in the princess’ being and in his love for her.

Then Kierkegaard introduces another character. The knight of faith, like the knight of infinite resignation, accepts that his union of love with the princess is the deepest aspect of himself, and also recognises that attempts to ‘move on’ from this love will involve the loss of his own self. Unlike the knight of infinite resignation, however, the knight of faith does not resign his love for the princess to the spiritual realm or the afterlife. The knight of faith knows that his very existence depends on real union with the princess in this life, and he knows equally well that this union is impossible. The knight of faith makes what is well-known (but little understood) as a ‘leap’ into faith acting on his dual conviction both that he could never be with the princess in this life and that he would be with the princess in this life (ibid., 36.) This involves what Kierkegaard refers to as a double-movement: a movement of relinquishing, followed immediately by the receiving back of the thing relinquished. It is crucial that this double-movement is essentially paradoxical, requiring both utter conviction that the love relinquished is foregone forever, as well as unwavering faith that union must, and will, be attained.

Silentio’s Abraham is, as the pseudonym would suggest, forced into silence as his act results in the ‘suspension of the ethical’: the suspension of the possibility of referential speech, as one leaves the realm in which the proper evaluative framework is a moral law or code of conduct. For Kierkegaard, the possibility of an ‘Abraham’ as he imagines him shows the limits of the ‘ethical’, and the necessity of a higher mode of existence to capture the true nature of an authentic life of individual faith. Abraham’s act of faith, for Kierkegaard, was to accept the fate of being unable to explain himself, ever, to anyone. The real life of faith is true individuality, not in an ‘aesthetic’ sense (where true ‘individuality’ is a maximally interesting persona/life)Footnote ⁹ but in Abraham’s sense. To be an individual requires being alone – requires, in Weil’s terms, experiencing ‘unconsoled affliction … no consolation – no apparent consolation’ (Weil Reference Weil1947, p. 12).

Like Kierkegaard’s double-movement of faith, which ends in fulfilled union as the result of an unspeakable act of faith, Weil’s double-movement of kenosis and grace results in a healing consolation (in the form of union with the divine) that she describes as ‘ineffable’. In both Weil’s and Kierkegaard’s accounts, we find agreement that the Good is larger than the category of the ethical, and that, insofar as our language of goodness exists in ethical terms, words will always fall short of capturing what is most deeply good. This seems especially true of creative activities. One may tell the tale of Van Gogh’s decision to paint The Starry Night, but this story will likely not reveal this choice to be obviously morally superior to other choices he might have made. Likewise, I can describe my process of deciding to have a child, but I cannot do so in ways that portray it as the logical result of ethical deliberation, and I likely cannot do it in ways that capture the deep goodness of it.

To the extent that Kierkegaard’s thought is useful here, I believe it to be in this way: it helps to shed light on the puzzle behind our apparent inability to offer definitive reasons for creating things in general. That is, while the ‘problem of creation’ for theism may not have an answer, this fact alone simply places it alongside most other decisions to create things. ‘Should she have written/painted/directed this particular piece rather than others? Rather than nothing?’; ‘Should she choose to have another child?’ These questions, in some complicated and difficult-to-explicate way, miss the mark. At least in many cases, they appear to fall away in the face of the creation itself.