Religion: From the Greeks to the Gospels

In an obscure leftist monthly (Politics) has appeared, in the guise of a study of the Iliad, a writing of remarkable spiritual resonance. It was written in France during the Nazi occupation. Its author: a French woman, Simone Weil, who died (1943) at 34. Its title: The Iliad, or The Poem of Force.

Force is the dominant fact of this most violent civilization in history. Force is the specific doctrine of the century's two characteristic political manifestations—Communism and Fascism. Force, in the form of history's two greatest wars, has been the century's most ineffaceable experience. Force, in the form of the atom bomb, reduced the most complicated and recondite efforts of man's mind to the mechanism of an infernal machine.

The use of force was nothing new. But what the 20th Century contributed was a growing belief in force as a beneficent factor in human progress. This was the 20th Century's specific heresy. This heresy is the background against which Simone Weil wrote The Iliad, or The Poem of Force.

Says Simone Weil: "The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man's flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to. ...

"To define force—it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all; this is a spectacle the Iliad never wearies of showing us:

. . . the horses

Rattled the empty chariots through the files of battle,

Longing for their noble drivers. But they on the ground

Lay, dearer to the vultures than to their

wives.

The hero becomes a thing dragged behind a chariot in the dust:

All around, his black hair

Was spread; in the dust his whole head lay,

That once-charming head; now Zeus had let his enemies

Defile it on his native soil. . . ."

The Force That Does Not Kill. "Here we see force in its grossest and most summary form—the force that kills. How much more varied in its processes, how much more surprising in its effects is the other force, the force that does not kill, i.e., that does not kill just yet. It will surely kill, it will possibly kill, or perhaps it merely hangs, poised and ready, over the head of the creature it can kill, at any moment, which is to say at every moment. In whatever aspect, its effect is the same: it turns a man into a stone. From its first property (the ability to turn a human being into a thing by the simple method of killing him) flows another, quite prodigious too in its own way, the ability to turn a human being into a thing while he is still alive. He is alive; he has a soul; and yet—he is a thing.