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Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics

War and Grace: The Force of Simone Weil on Homer

Author(s): Adrian Poole

Source: Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, Third Series, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Winter,

1992), pp. 1-15

Published by: through its publication Trustees of Boston University Arion: A Journal of

Humanities and the Classics

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War and Grace: The Force of Simone Weil on Homer

ADRIAN POOLE

vJimone weil thought it all went wrong with Rome. Rome meant war; Greece meant grace. Her philhelle nism scarcely makes her unique among major European intel lectuals of the last two hundred years; the lost domain called

Ancient Greece has figured in many a myth of the fall from a state of cultural grace. But Weil stands alone in the pugnacity of her claim for an essential continuity between the spirit of Greece and the spirit of Christianity. She thought the Gospels were the "last marvelous expressions of the Greek genius, as the Iliad is the first."1 She announced that "the spirit that was trans

mitted from the Iliad to the Gospels by way of the tragic poets never jumped the borders of Greek civilization; once Greece was

destroyed, nothing remained of this spirit but pale reflections."2 Given a free hand, Weil would have restructured the scriptures, jettisoning the Old Testament and replacing it with the works of

Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Plato. With a certain charac teristic immodesty, she asserted that Sophocles was "to my knowledge much more Christian than any tragic poet of the last twenty centuries."3 The great recognition scene of the Electra

was for her an allegory of the human soul's meeting with Christ; this was, she said, "almost as certain for me as if I had written these verses myself."4 Her perilously racialist mythology incrim inated the Roman and Hebraic strands in Western culture as the sources for the will to power that had driven the juggernaut of

history. "Hitlerism" was just Rome all over again: the rule of

physical force, war as man's natural condition, the progressive annexing and erasing of all others and all otherness.

T. S. Eliot risked little chance of dissent when he said that he could not conceive of anybody's agreeing with all of Weil's views, or of not disagreeing violently with some of them. One



2 WAR AND GRACE

may dissent from Eliot's recommendation that we waive the

question of agreement or disagreement, and "simply expose ourselves to the personality of a woman of genius."5 But Eliot

presumably meant that the kind of exposure one incurs in read

ing Weil raises questions about one's own beliefs at a deeper level than more usual kinds of intellectual concurrence or divergence.

And if tragedy proposes questions about one's deepest beliefs, then Simone Weil's writings propose questions about the nature and apprehension of tragedy that no one in this one world can now afford to ignore.

Weil was blessed and cursed with a sense of the world's one ness. Simone de Beauvoir tells of her young scholarly rival weep ing at the news of famine in China, and comments, "I envied her for having a heart that could beat right across the world."6

Weil's heart could beat right across history, too, in indignation at the Fall of Troy and of Carthage, at the annihilation of the Druids and the Cathars. Such cordial excursions across time and

space are vulnerable to disparagement, but they were never

unaccompanied by a lucid intelligence. She herself wrote, in one of her letters to Father Perrin, as she left France for what turned out to be the last time:

Our love should stretch as widely across all space, and should be as equally distributed in every portion of it, as is the very light of the sun. Christ has bidden us to attain to the perfection of our heavenly Father by imitating his indis criminate bestowal of light. Our intelligence too should have the same complete impartiality.7

Weil's intelligence fixed with particular relentlessness on the

problem of power, on the relations between victor and victim, master and slave, ruler and underdog. Such problems of power have become critical to our modern understandings of tragedy, in both its political and its psychological aspects, just as tragedy

has come to seem a necessary aid to the sense we make of poli tics and psychology.

Homer played a central role in her thinking about power. When she recorded her humiliating experience as an unskilled

factory worker in 1934-35, she headed her Journal with a line from Hector's prophetic speech to Andromache about the slav

ery that awaits her: "Much against your will, under pressure of



Adrian Poole 3

a harsh necessity" (Iliad, 6.458).8 She carried Homer with her, at times literally. When she thought she was about to be arrested in Marseilles in 1941, she took with her only her clothes and the Iliad. Her passionate attention to this text received concentrated

expression in the justly celebrated essay, "LTliade ou le po?me de la force," written in the late 1930s, and published in Mar seilles in 1940-41.9

For the modern reader the Iliad offers a certain comfort in the

very immediacy, the patency and palpability, of the forms that force assumes. For the most part the killer and the killed stand face to face, body to body, at most a spear's throw away, or,

more rarely, an arrow's flight. The Iliad is constantly measuring distances. Many deaths are tolled with the formula t?lothi

patres, "far from his homeland." One of the poem's prime sub

jects is the distance between the giving and the taking away of all the best things of human culture. With her keen ear Weil selects one of the most memorable of such distances: the moment at

which Andromache orders water for Hector's bath on his return from battle, while her husband lies dead, t?le loetr?n, "far from hot baths" (22.445). Weil comments:

Far from hot baths he was indeed, poor man. And not he alone. Nearly all the Iliad takes place far from hot baths.

Nearly all of human life, then and now, takes place far from hot baths.10

The distances represented by the Iliad include the distance between mortal beings and their deathless masters. But even this is not an inscrutable distance. A man can wound a goddess, a

goddess can bring new armor to her son, the gods can gather to watch the spectacle of the poem's climax. Yet Weil is uninter ested in Homer's gods; it is the human distances that concern her most closely. In the world in which she writes this essay, the human measures of Homer are hard to locate. It is no longer pos sible to see through or across the weapons and tools and artifacts that regulate the disposition of force, whether in peace or war, between killers and killed or rulers and ruled. They have become too abstract, too thick, too drained of human sentience. Human

beings are now condemned, as it were, to a more or less bleak or

desperate telepathy.



4 WAR AND GRACE

What does it mean to be a slave? Weil agreed with Nietzsche that Christianity was the religion of slaves, but the inferences she drew from this swept her in exactly the opposite direction.

Imagine the figure of a massive weapon that joins and separates the master and the slave: Nietzsche and Weil gravitate toward

opposite ends. For Weil the first step toward understanding such a weapon or structure of force must be to identify its sharpest end or edge, and then to identify with the nature of the human life sacrificed in its justification. The outcasts, the undermost of

underdogs, the human waste: it is to them that one must look for the means of measuring the justice embodied in any human structure or artifact. It was for the clarity with which it embod ied this perspective that she valued King Lear far above the rest

of Shakespeare. Meditating on her own sense of unworthiness in a letter to Father Perrin, she consoled herself with the thought: "But perhaps God likes to use cast-away objects, waste, rejects."11 She had a deep fear of finding herself on the wrong side of the frontiers and structures of power?on the inside, on

top, saved: as if to be caught even contemplating the idea of hap piness or victory or salvation would be to damn oneself with the

guilt of abandoning all those who were tormented, lost, annihi lated. She scorned to look beyond the Cross. She could not bring

herself to enter the Church: "So many things are outside it, so

many things that I love and do not want to give up, so many things that God loves, otherwise they would not be in exis tence."12 Such a partisan solidarity with the outcast leads logi cally to a condemnation of history itself. History, she con

cluded, "is nothing but a compilation of the depositions made by assassins with respect to their victims and themselves."13 There is an absolute duty to listen to these victims: not the honorable losers whose voices have graced a high enough stage to assure themselves of a place in the story, but the dumb, anonymous

mass of humanity ungifted with a recognizable voice at all. Our

ordinary structures of power leave little chance of the underdog being heard. Fear ties the tongue, Weil insists, as it ties the

tongue of the stammering wretch in a police court, faced with "a

magistrate who keeps up an elegant flow of witticisms."14 Not for the first or last time this makes one think of Brecht, who liked to redramatize such an image of power relations, to anarchize it.



Adrian Poole 5

The tongue-tied wretch can be found in one of Weil's finest

essays, "Human Personality." Just before it occurs, she writes:

In those who have suffered too many blows, in slaves for

example, that place in the heart from which the infliction of evil evokes a cry of surprise may seem to be dead. But it is never quite dead; it is simply unable to cry out any more. It has sunk into a state of dumb and ceaseless lamentation.15

This pain is the real underside of history, of culture, of all human

makings. But how can one "hear" a pain that is dumb? One may give it a voice that is not its own, as Weil's near-contemporary George Orwell does when he looks out of the train at a young woman poking a stick up a blocked waste-pipe: "She knew well

enough what was happening to her?understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter

cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe."16 No matter how humane the motive, there is too much ease in the voice that alliterates a "dreadful destiny" and a "slimy slum." This is to speak for the woman, rather than to listen to her. More work is required in the language, a more strenuous collaboration.

In her book The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry argues that pain and imagining are inextricably linked, no less bound up with each other than are slaves and masters.17 The imagination must be constantly at work to transform pain into expression. Trag edy is particularly concerned with such "work," the transforma tion of pain into expression. The consciousness of tragedy dwells

patiently at this threshold of pain, in waiting, en hypomon?i, to use Weil's favored Greek phrase. It is the threshold at which

something threatens to slip beyond the reach of culture, beyond the communicative powers of language itself, into the unspeak able. Deinon gar oude rh?ton, says Philoctetes to Neoptolemus, in Sophocles' play: "It is a pain that cannot be spoken" (756).

But tragedies refuse to accept this, that there is a pain that can not be uttered and heard and shared, and thus in principle, as

Scarry so finely argues, transformed into the gifts of culture. To borrow one of Weil's most significant images, tragedy tries to

provide "an attentive silence in which this faint and inept cry can make itself heard."18



6 WAR AND GRACE

If a grace may be born out of such silence, the silence has to be carved out of ceaseless hubbub: the noise of war. In her Iliad

essay Weil imagines the immunity in which the victor is

cocooned, deafened and blinded to the resemblance between himself and his victims.

The man who is the possessor of force seems to walk

through a non-resistant element; in the human substance that surrounds him nothing has the power to interpose between the impulse and the act, the tiny interval that is reflection.19

This imperviousness is of course a fiction, and a deeply perni cious one. The Iliad ruthlessly punctures these fictions, as do its

heirs, the Greek tragedians. It does so through the constant

reversals, large and small, in which the flick of a spear-thrust changes victor into victim. There are figures in the text who can reflect on this process?the women, for example, and the men in their temporary exemptions from battle, Hector, and Patroclus, and, above all, Achilles. It is Achilles, the greatest embodiment of the warrior ethos, who is graced with the ability to see

through its fictiveness: katthan' hornos ho t'aergos an?r ho te

polla eorg?s (9.320): "the man who does nothing and the man who does much meet the same death." But the attentive reader, too, is embroiled in this process of recognition. Reprieved from the war of the text, the reader is repeatedly asked to endure "the

tiny interval that is reflection." "Ce temps d'arr?t d'o? seul proc?dent nos ?gards envers nos

semblables." Mary McCarthy translates: "that halt, that inter val of hesitation, wherein lies all our consideration for our brothers in humanity."20 "Nos semblables"? Our likenesses. We

may think of tragedy as a form of attention that unites in a vision of likeness-and-difference the double image of victor and victim. This endless reversibility is one of the great teachings of the Iliad. It also informs the first extant Greek tragedy that we pos sess. In The Persians, Aeschylus presented to his Athenian audi ence the humiliation of their feared and hated enemies. The play shares the Homeric ethos that comes to fruition in the meeting of Achilles and Priam in the last book of the Iliad. This was the ethos that Weil so admired, according to which the abasement of the enemy is a source not of mindless jubilation but of chas



Adrian Poole 7

tened reflection. In the very midst of their jubilation Aeschylus asks his fellow Athenians to contemplate a likeness. McCarthy's phrase "brothers in humanity" grows out of a more sentimental

phase of civilization. The objectivity embodied in the French "semblable" cleaves nearer the Homeric mark.

Weil's image of the "halt, the interval of hesitation" is a pre cious one. In this momentary silence lies the possibility of escap ing the deadening circles of force, the laws of gravity. What the Iliad supremely represents is the interminable conflict between these principles: the petrifactive rule of force, of gravity, of nat ural necessity, that produces the world of "war"; and the possi bility of an alternative principle, glimpsed in moments of hesitation or dissent, "those brief, celestial moments in which

man possesses his own soul."21 Tragedies are themselves such moments of arrest. They are forms of attention, forms for atten

tion, through which we can pause to examine the narratives by which we live and are lived. No wonder that this figure of a criti cal arrest should recur so frequently at the heart of the great tragic texts themselves, above all in those moments of agony before the taking or surrender of human life: the moments at which the Aeschylean Cassandra pauses before she walks into her death or the Sophoclean Antigone walks out to hers, the

moments at which the Aeschylean Orestes turns to Pylades before he kills Clytemnestra or Shakespeare's Macbeth contem

plates the murder of Duncan, the moments at which Euripides' Dionysus breathes the meaningless ? on which the Bacchae piv ots or at which Shakespeare marks Coriolanus's surrender to his

mother by the soundless stage direction: "holds her by the hand silent."

In his essay on "Ethics and Tragedy," Donald MacKinnon remembers a remark of the Duke of Wellington. A gushing

woman bubbled up to him: "A victory must be a supremely exhilarating and glorious experience." Wellington dissented: "A

victory, Madam, is the greatest tragedy in the world, only excepting a defeat."22 Weil goes further than this. There are not two tragedies, in victory and defeat, but a single one, in which victors and defeated simultaneously participate: "To strike or to be struck is one and the same defilement. The chill of steel is

equally mortal at the hilt and at the point."23 Writing on Plato's

Symposium she observed:



8 WAR AND GRACE

Today, faced by an act of violence, some people accord their

sympathy to him who exerts violence, others to him who suffers it. There is cowardice in each of these attitudes. The best among the Greeks, beginning with the poet or poets of the Iliad, know that all that submits to or that exerts might is in the same way and in the same measure subject to its

degrading empire.24

Given Weil's astonishing capacity to identify with the victims of

violence, her assertion that there is "cowardice" in each of these attitudes is a startling one. If it is true, then where does courage lie? One answer is implied by the sentence that asserts the com

mon subjection of victor and victim to the "degrading empire" of force. Courage could mean emigrating from this evil empire, and through the rigors of spiritual discipline, grasping the

promise of a world of grace elsewhere. Yet the exigencies of his

tory can make such emigration a perilous affair. It is distressing now to hear in Weil's pre-Munich political essays the cry for

neutrality at all costs?including the sacrifice of France's treaty obligations to Czechoslovakia.25 Weil was scarcely alone in the underestimations represented by her pacifist position, and

thankfully it was far from her last word. There was and is another possible answer. This would be to

say that courage lies in a complex engagement of sympathy both with victor and with victim. And a different escape route from the degradation of force might lie not in emigrating, but in stay ing to transform the empire of force into an empire of justice and love. This is exactly what Weil committed herself to in the

work she performed for the Free French in London, up until her death in August 1943. Such a transformation would require both labor and grace. It is over the relations between the labor and the grace that readers who cannot share Weil's religious convictions must part company with her. It is possible to believe that within the nature of "force," there rests a creative principle, however badly obscured by the evidence of its abuse. So deep

was Weil's horror of the violence of which force was capable that she averted her eyes from this possibility. Yet she could have found evidence for it in one of the very texts in which she herself invested trust. In the opening choral song of Aeschylus' Aga

memnon, the chorus appeals to the mysterious idea that the

gods may show to mortals a charts biaios, a forceful grace (182).



Adrian Poole g

Such a notion recurs with more particularity in the Prometheus Bound, when Prometheus foretells the long wanderings of the

hapless Io, the victim of Zeus's lust and Hera's persecution. Finally, mysteriously, Prometheus promises, Zeus will heal Io's

madness and restore her wits, stroking her with a hand that causes no fear, the merest touch (epaph?n atarbei cheiri kai thi

g?n monon, 849). We can glimpse here an idea from which Weil's uncompromising rejection of force requires her to

shrink ?the intimation that force itself might miraculously mutate into justice and love; or more cautiously, the sense that force might contain within itself the twinned potential for cre ation and destruction.

The idea of grace has a certain doubleness in Weil's own writ

ings. It is closely associated with "patience" and "waiting," as it is so often in the New Testament. Paul tells the Romans that we

must hope to be saved, and that this is something we must wait for with patience (Romans, 8:25); he assures the Corinthians that love "endureth all things" (I Corinthians, 13:7); James recalls the great example of patience set by Job (James, 5:11).

Hypomon?: Weil found particular comfort in this Greek word, which is variously translated as patience, endurance, fortitude, perseverance. In her own writings, "grace" manifests itself pri

marily as a means of resistance against the domain of force. But this protest must find a particular, material form to take, as the

experience of the Occupation and her own exile brought home to her. Passive resistance is not enough. She wrote:

This period of painful waiting is of the utmost importance for the destiny of France_We must turn suffering into an indissoluble bond through generosity and mutual aid. We

must think of the precious things we allowed to be lost because we did not know how to appreciate them, things that we have to regain and that we will have to preserve, things whose values we now know.... Our domestic pro paganda cannot be made of words; to be effective, it must consist of dazzling realities (des r?alit?s ?clatantes).26

What are these realities for the survival of which we must labor and fight and if necessary die? Czeslaw Milosz must speak for

many readers of Weil when he says that she makes him feel a Cal iban in the face of an Ariel.27 There is a lack of body to Weil's



10 WAR AND GRACE

conception of these "dazzling realities." In The Need for Roots she enunciates them as "The Needs of the Soul": Order, Liberty,

Obedience, Responsibility, Equality, Hierarchism, Honour, Punishment, Freedom of Opinion, Security, Risk, Private Prop erty, Collective Property, Truth. They are dazzling indeed, shed

ding more light than warmth. No faith, no hope, no charity. Weil revered the Iliad for the grace embodied in it. It takes

two forms. There is the radiant sense in which grace breaks

through when people recognize the reality of love. Love takes

many forms?between host and guest, children and parents, brothers and husbands and wives and comrades, and most mirac ulous of all, between benefactor and suppliant, victor and van

quished. When Priam comes to plead for Hector's body, the father and the man who has killed his son come face to face, and

they gaze in wonder at each other. Weil comments, "These moments of grace are rare in the Iliad, but they are enough to make us feel with sharp regret what it is that violence has killed and will kill again."28

There is a second, more oblique form of grace that requires from the reader a special attentiveness. This grace is wrought into the very texture of the poem itself: it is "the note of incur able bitterness that continually makes itself heard, though often

only a single word marks its presence, often a mere stroke of the verse, or a run-on line."29 The note of the Iliad is a "bitterness that proceeds from tenderness," and it makes present in a per petual undertone the reality of the justice and love that violence seeks to destroy. One could illustrate indefinitely the truth of

Weil's claim that in the Iliad "nothing precious is scorned ... whatever is destroyed is regretted."30 Whenever a man dies, something more than a man dies with him. Protesilaus, say, the first Achaean to die at Troy, who leaves behind in Phylake a wife

with lacerated cheeks and a house half-finished (a fine example of Weil's "run on line": 2.700-01). Or Xanthus and Thoon,

whose death leaves their father, Phaenops, no sons to whom he can bequeath his property, and so ?more distant relations

stepped into the estate (5.158). Or Cebriones, around whose

body the battle rages, while he lies lelasmenos hipposyna?n (16.776), "his horsemanship all forgotten" (Lattimore). Or

Patroclus, whose body Menelaus rouses the Achaeans to defend with the memory of how lovable their comrade was: p?sin gar epistato meilichos einai (17.671-72): "for he knew how to be



Adrian Poole n

gentle to everyone." Patroclus is the Iliad's most gentle man; Briseis will use the same word of him?meilichos (19.300). We are asked to remember this word when Lycaon pleads for his life to Achilles, and he finds no kindness or mercy in the avenger of

Patroclus, who is ameilikton (21.98). There is force in Weil's reading, a loving force. But there is a

more material sense of grace embedded in the poem than her

spiritualized account can allow. One of the deaths she notices is that of Euphorbus, who saw only a single day of war: "Blood soaked his hair, that hair like to the Graces'_" But it is reveal

ing that Weil should stop there and omit the clinching detail that the lovely hair was tightly bound with gold and silver

(17.51-52). The word in the Greek New Testament which trans lates as "grace" is charis. Before this elevation, charts has a dense

material life in Homer and the Greek tragedians (along with its

cognate verbal and adjectival forms). The graces it signifies are embodied in human actions and responses, physical features and artifacts. A single English word will not cover the range of its

meanings: gracefulness, graciousness, kindness, favor, grati tude, joy. At the heart of the word is the sense of a goodwill embodied in a human form (especially a face) or artifact or action that will gladden those others on whom this force falls or at whom it is directed. This force goes out to others, but it will or should come back from them: the same word covers the sense of favor given and received.

The word charis has a particular stress in the Sophoclean trag edy that most directly engages with Homeric materials and val ues, Ajax. When Tecmessa makes her great plea to Ajax to surrender his inexorable sense of himself, she does so by appeal ing to the principle of gratitude (a word that in our own lan

guage is cognate with "grace"). She says: charis charin gar estin he tiktous' aei (522); "for it is always grace that gives birth to

grace." The form of this line expresses the very essence of the

word, which is its mutuality, its collaborativeness. The goodwill of charis is something embodied in the actions both of giver and receiver. It is the breaking of this creative circuit of exchange that Tecmessa fears. Pindar writes, or sings, of charis d\ haper hapanta teuchei ta meilicha thn?tois9 (Olympian, 1.30);31 "grace that makes everything that is gentle to mortals." Meili cha? again we hear the word peculiarly associated with the

Homeric Patroclus.



12 WAR AND GRACE

In the human makings of the Iliad there is more faith and joy than Weil allows. Or rather, in the human power to make. This force will not be destroyed, even as this particular person is unmade. And this force is woven into the very texture of the poem. How much loving attention is paid to the labor that pro duces the mundane amenities of culture, the materials with

which the human body is protected and adorned, for example, such as the new tunic and the good pair of shoes that Agamem non puts on when he wakes from the false dream Zeus has sent

(2.42-46). Or to the skilled work that has gone into making Pandarus' bow from the horns of a wild goat?the bow with which he will break the truce (4.105-11). At one of the poem's climactic moments of personal grief there wells up an excess of such detail. When Andromache faints at the sight of Hector's

body being dragged round the walls of Troy, the articles of cloth

ing that fall from her are meticulously commemorated.

She fell backward, and gasped the life breath from her, and far off

threw from her head the shining gear that ordered her headdress,

the diadem and the cap, and the holding-band woven together,

and the circlet, which Aphrodite the golden once had

given her on that day when Hektor of the shining helmet led her forth from the house of E?tion, and gave numberless gifts to

win her.

(Lattimore: 22.467-72)

In this sequence we retrace the making of the marriage that has bound her life together, and we watch its unmaking in the dis

mantling of her body's attire. "So many folds of favor" ?as

Shakespeare makes France protest, in disbelief, at King Lear's

repudiation of his "best object," in the play's opening scene. The grace that Weil perceives in the poem attends the loss of

human gifts. But there is also a grace in the making of these gifts, and in the acts of giving and receiving and enjoying them.

Throughout her writings Weil underestimates the virtues in such human exchanges, so alive is she to their risks. The robe that Hector bids Hecuba devote to Athene is chariestatos



Adrian Poole 13

(6.271-72). The clothing that he himself will now never wear is

lepta te kai charienta ("fine-textured and pleasant"; Lattimore:

22.511). Hector prays for a future in which his son Astyanax will return safe from battle to gladden his mother's heart: char ei? de phrena m?t?r (6.481). Iphiclamus dies before he has known any joy with the bride he has just married: h?s ou ti charin ide (11.242-43). There is a promise of joy in the very presence of a lovable face or body. Bris?is laments over the body of Patroclus, who was moi deil?i pleiston kecharismene thym?i, "most gracious to me in my misery" (19.287). When Achilles hears the news of Patroclus' death he defaces his charien pros? pon ("handsome countenance"; Lattimore: 18.24), and he will in turn mutilate Hector's head, paros charien (22.403). When

Hermes materializes alongside Priam on the way to Achilles, he takes the most welcome form he can find, of a young man at the

most graceful time of youth, chariestat? h?b? (24.348). Elaine Scarry has given eloquent expression to a view of

human creativity that commands my admiration. There is room in this view for an idea of grace. Such a grace would not be a

power that enabled our release from the realm of fallen nature, the laws of gravity. It would be a force that enabled us to work that domain through the arts of human culture. This grace

would be intrinsic to the power of human making itself. It would be made most vivid in the moments at which we become con scious that its most valued products are being unmade. Tragedy

would be a way of attaining such consciousness in advance, as it were. Scarry refers briefly but explicitly to Homer, as the great model for a proper response to the experience of collective

unmaking that is war.32 She cites the example of the spear that kills Pedaeus: it passes through his teeth and severs his tongue, but it passes also through the work of goodly Theano, who nursed him, even as one of her own children, bastard though he

was, to please (charizomene) her husband (5.69-75). At each moment of death it is not just a particular individual whose pres ence is unmade, but a whole world of culture, its processes and

values, that have gone into his or her making. Tragedy is a means of protesting against the field of brute force, its evil empire, and

Scarry's argument suggests the forms into which this protest must turn. We have to imagine and then realize the transforma tion of weapon into tool, of battlefield into city. It is unending

work.



14 WAR AND GRACE

To end on a grace note: Hephaestus is one of the most sympa thetic of Homer's gods. We can recognize something of our own

vulnerability in his crippled body; he is not a perfect Olympian. There is an attractive sociability to the way he makes a fool of

himself, and makes the other gods laugh. Across the vast

expanses of the Iliad his lameness associates him with the "pray ers" in Phoenix's speech to Achilles in Book 9. These prayers are the daughters of Zeus, "and they are lame of their feet, and wrin

kled, and cast their eyes sidelong" (Lattimore: 9.503); they fol low ate round the world, trying to undo the havoc wreaked by the spirit of Ruin. Hephaestus' great moment comes when

Thetis asks him to forge new armor for her son, Achilles.

Hephaestus is a figure of creativity, but he does not make with a

godlike ease, by magic or by force of will: he has to work. Thetis finds him black with soot and covered with sweat. It is of the utmost importance that the extraordinary creation prompted by her request is an exemplary expression of gratitude. There is a

wonderful excess to the great shield that Hephaestus creates, the most beautiful and elaborate of the many artifacts within the poem. Thetis had not asked for this. The excess is a means of

thanksgiving. For Hephaestus is repaying Thetis for the kind ness she showed him when he was hurled out of heaven by his own angry mother. Thetis saved him and nursed him, and now he returns the favor with this gift for her other, own and mortal child. The humans in this poem are rarely able to repay their par ents and nurses. More than once we hear the sad formula: oude

tokeusi/threptra philois aped?ke ("he could not render again the care of his dear parents"; Lattimore: 4.477-78; 17.301-02)

?

where the word threptra means "the returns made by children for their bringing up."

Homer gives Hephaestus a beautiful wife and her name is Charis. It is good to think that a god who embodies a frailty and a force so recognizably human should consort with such good grace.



Adrian Poole 15

NOTES References to Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles are to the Oxford Classical Texts. Translations are my own unless stated otherwise; in the case of Homer, "Lattimore" refers to the translation of the Iliad by Richmond Lattimore (Chi cago, 1951). The place of publication is London unless stated otherwise.

1. Simone Weil: An Anthology, ed. Sian Miles (1986), p. 212. 2. Weil: Anthology, p. 213. 3. Simone Weil, Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks (Lon

don and New York, 1987), p. 8. 4. Weil, Intimations, p. 34. 5. Simone Weil, The Need for Roots, preface by T. S. Eliot (London and New

York, 1987), p. vi. 6. Quoted by David McLellan, Simone Weil: Utopian Pessimist (1989), p. 18. 7. Simone Weil, Waiting on God, trans. Emma Craufurd (1951), p. 44. 8. Simone Weil, Formative Writings 1929-1941, trans, and ed. Dorothy Tuck.

McFarland and Wilhelmina Van Ness (Amherst, 1987), p. 155. 9. Mary McCarthy's translation, "The Iliad or the Poem of Force" (first pub

lished in 1945), is reprinted in Weil: Anthology, pp. 182-215, and Intimations, pp. 24-55.

10. Weil: Anthology, p. 184. 11. Weil, Waiting on God, p. 24. 12. Weil, Waiting on God, p. 28. 13. Weil, The Need for Roots, p. 215. 14. Weil: Anthology, p. 73. 15. Weil: Anthology, p. 72. 16. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (Harmondsworth, 1962), p. 17. 17. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (New York and Oxford, 1985). 18. Weil: Anthology, p. 73. 19. Weil: Anthology, p. 194. 20. Weil: Anthology, p. 194. 21. Weil: Anthology, p. 206. 22. Donald MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5 (1979), p. 192. 23. Simone Weil, Selected Essays 1934-43, trans. R. Rees (Oxford, 1962),

p. 49. 24. Weil, Intimations, p. 117. 25. See the section "War and Peace" in Weil, Formative Writings, pp. 227

78; in particular, "A European War over Czechoslovakia?," pp. 284-88. 26. Weil, Formative Writings, p. 278. 27. Czeslaw Milosz, "The Importance of Simone Weil," in Emperor of the

Earth: Modes of Eccentric Vision (Berkeley, 1981), p. 97. 28. Weil: Anthology, p. 208. 29. Weil: Anthology, p. 20S. 30. Weil: Anthology, p. 208. 31. See W B. Stanford's note on Sophocles, Ajax, 522, in his edition of the

play (Bristol, 1981). 32. Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 123.



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