The Eucharist

‘Truth, Lord; but I have marr’d them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.’
‘And know you not,’ says Love, ‘Who bore the blame?’
‘My dear, then I will serve.’
‘You must sit down,’ says Love, ‘and taste my meat.’
So I did sit and eat.

As mentioned in the last post, George Herbert’s poem, ‘Love bade me welcome’, was central to Simone Weil’s conversion. In the last two lines of the final verse, ‘Love’ invites the reluctant convert to sit and eat at the Lord’s table; however, Weil’s inner qualms about eating dominated her life, and eventually contributed to her ill health and early death.

‘The eternal part of the soul feeds on hunger.’ This statement rather seems to sum up Weil’s deeply problematic relationship with food. She believed that in the Eucharist God really is present in the bread and wine: where matter and spirit come together. We are then transformed by the Eucharist, but only if we detach ourselves from our material nature. For Weil the Eucharist was purity, but she believed that this is a purity which we should look at rather than possess, and then by our attention we are transformed. She wrote: ‘The Eucharist is food for the soul only in so far as we contemplate it and it sharpens our hunger’. She wrote a year before her death,

‘the soul knows for certain only that it is hungry. The important thing is that it announces its hunger by crying. A child does not stop crying if we suggest to it that perhaps there is no bread … The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry.’

Weil also demanded that her body and soul renounced food.

‘When we do not eat, our organism consumes its own flesh and transforms it into energy. It is the same with the soul. The soul that does not eat consumes itself. The eternal part consumes the mortal part of the soul and transforms it.’

Even our soul wants to eat what it should only look at, and it, too, like the body must endure hunger. Reflecting the Vedantic influence on her thought, Weil quotes an Upanishad: “Two winged companions, two birds are on the branch of a tree. One eats the fruit the other looks at it.” Weil comments that “these two birds are the two parts of the soul.” The eternal part of the soul should consume the earthly part of the desires, and yet when we fill them, we still desire. She writes, “what is eaten is necessarily destroyed”.

Her reasoning was that if we eat what we desire then we only see ourselves. This too is what happens she thought in love, where we try to assimilate other people into ourselves. Weil believed the act of eating is the origin of human sin – if only Eve had looked at the apple instead of eating it the world would be different. Any hope of salvation lies in contemplating rather than eating.

How can we understand this pathology, which despite Weil’s religious justification, and philosophical writings and insight it surely is?  One friend of Weil, “had the feeling that she was obsessed by the desire not to eat.” He called her a “creature who was at war with her own life”, and remarked that eating seemed a base and disgusting function to her. The doctors seemed unclear what was physical – how much it was that it was difficult for her to eat at all after a lifetime of deprivation, and, what was psychological, given Weil’s desire for mortification of the flesh, and her wish to express solidarity with those she saw as starving during the war.

Weil’s “becoming” is hard to understand. Carl Jung might have suggested that she was failing to integrate her very mixed feelings about herself and her existence; but perhaps that is ungracious given her public philosophy and sacrifice.