DT3013 The Tasks of Life

The tasks of life:
Pascal, Kafka, Weil

and Levinas
Divinity/Theology
J. McDade, SJ
2010
91002D091
This guide was prepared for the University of London International Programmes by:
Rev. Dr John McDade, Principal, Heythrop College, University of London.
This is one of a series of subject guides published by the University. We regret that due
to pressure of work the author is unable to enter into any correspondence relating to, or
arising from, the guide. If you have any comments on this subject guide, favourable or
unfavourable, please use the form at the back of this guide.
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Published by: University of London Press

University of London 2010
Printed by: Central Printing Service, University of London, England
Contents
Contents
Introduction..........................................................................................................................1
Aims and objectives..........................................................................................................2
How to use this guide........................................................................................................2
Reading for this subject....................................................................................................3
Recommendation on study time.......................................................................................4
Examination......................................................................................................................4
Sample examination paper................................................................................................4
Different texts and how to read them...............................................................................4
Readerly/Writerly texts.....................................................................................................5
A reminder of your learning outcomes.............................................................................6
Chapter 1: Blaise Pascal (162362).....................................................................................7
Essential reading...............................................................................................................7
Additional reading............................................................................................................7
How to read the Penses...................................................................................................8
Introduction.......................................................................................................................8
Textual commentaries on the Penses..............................................................................9
Pascals Night of Fire....................................................................................................11
Boredom and diversion...................................................................................................13
Pascal on the Three Orders..........................................................................................14
Some comments on Pascals Three Orders..................................................................15
God and revelation..........................................................................................................16
Lost in the cosmos..........................................................................................................17
Summary.........................................................................................................................18
Learning outcomes ........................................................................................................18
Sample examination questions.......................................................................................18
Chapter 2: Franz Kafka (18831924)...............................................................................19
Essential reading.............................................................................................................19
Additional reading..........................................................................................................20
Websites..........................................................................................................................21
Introduction.....................................................................................................................21
Stories and meanings......................................................................................................23
Religion in Kafka?..........................................................................................................25
Some stories....................................................................................................................28
On the Tram ...................................................................................................................28
A Knock at the Manor Gate............................................................................................28
In the Penal Colony.........................................................................................................29
Before the Law................................................................................................................31
Some interpretations of Before the Law.........................................................................32
The City Coat of Arms....................................................................................................35
Some more stories...........................................................................................................36
Summary.........................................................................................................................36
Learning outcomes.........................................................................................................37
The tasks of life: Pascal, Kafka, Weil and Levinas
Chapter 3: Simone Weil (190943)...................................................................................39

Introduction.....................................................................................................................40
The Great Beast and the Cave.........................................................................................41
Whats the problem? ......................................................................................................42
The task(s) of life............................................................................................................43
Necessity, obedience and affliction................................................................................45
Decreation and necessity................................................................................................46
Revelation and self-emptying.........................................................................................47
Forms of the Implicit Love of God.................................................................................48
Summary.........................................................................................................................49
Chapter 4: Emmanuel Levinas (190696)........................................................................51
Introduction.....................................................................................................................52
Love your neighbour as yourself....................................................................................52
Infinite responsibility and God.......................................................................................54
Responding to the face of the other..............................................................................55
Ethics, religion and transcendence.................................................................................58
Human independence, human intelligence and the destruction
of the numinous...............................................................................................................59
Doing good is the act of belief itself............................................................................61
Christianity and Judaism................................................................................................61
To Love the Torah More than God...............................................................................63
God veiling his Countenance.......................................................................................63
Summary.........................................................................................................................65
Appendix 1: The tasks of life: a summary.......................................................................67
Appendix 2: Sample examination paper..........................................................................71
ii
Introduction
Introduction
We dont receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one
can take for us or spare us.
(Marcel Proust)
The Philosophical Writings

of Descartes, I (Cambridge
University Press, 1985), p.10.
At the start of his Rules for the Direction of the Mind, the seventeenth century
philosopher Ren Descartes explains why a person should study philosophy (search
out the truth of things) and he makes it clear that it is in order that his intellect should
show his will what decision it ought to make in each of lifes contingencies.1 In other
words, philosophy is to help us find our way through life in a constructive way, to
enable us to face the challenges which life sets before us. We are to reflect in order to
live better. An ancient insight, of course, and the term traditionally used to identify this
goal is wisdom (Greek: sophia): if we can find wisdom, we will know who we are and
how we are to live. But how to find wisdom?
The Jewish tradition of wisdom writings (among them: Proverbs in the Bible, The
Wisdom of Solomon, Ben Sirach, in the Apocrypha) places this search at the heart of
our dealings with God. A single example must suffice: Sirach 24 is a poem in which the
female figure of Wisdom speaks about herself and her role in creation and revelation. It
portrays Wisdom, present in the lives of all, as directed by God to take up a particular
dwelling place in Israel. Where? In the book of the covenant of the Most High God,
the Law that Moses commanded us (Sir 24.23). So, Wisdom comes to be en-bibliated
(en-booked) in the Torah, the Law that Israel observes as part of its covenant with
God. Jewish religious observance, then, is an existential engagement with Wisdom.
The Gospel of John (its Prologue is a Christian variation on Sir 24) will say that the
presence of divine Wisdom in the Law has been deepened through being en-fleshed
(incarnated) in the person of Jesus Christ (John 1.14). Analogous to Torah observance,
Christian discipleship is presented as the final way in which human beings are to
connect existentially with divine Wisdom.
If the search for wisdom, however imperfectly attained, is a search for God, then
when we inquire into the limits and possibilities available to human life, this can be a
path towards God. Wherever truth is acknowledged and the requirements of goodness
practised, a contact takes place with God who is the fullness of truth and love in ways
that fulfil our nature.
On True Religion 5, 9.
(Oxford University Press,

2007).
This has been recognised since the early Christian centuries: in 390 AD, St Augustine,
attempting to relate Platonic philosophy and Christian religion, argued against the
separation of philosophy and religion: our faith and teaching have demonstratedthat
there is not one thing called philosophy, that is, devotion to wisdom, and another called
religion.2 For Augustine, philosophy and religion are conjoined ways in which the
human person is brought into contact with God through understanding and faith. In these
traditions, the conjunction of inquiry and faith is central, on the one hand, to a humanity
searching for God and, on the other, to Gods unsurpassable closeness to humanity in
grace and in revelation. Often people ask about whether there is a meaning to life as
though it is something discovered rather than created. Terry Eagletons The Meaning of
Life,3 for example, is an entertaining, accessible and instructive survey of the range of
philosophical and religious answers to the meaning of life. He does not think that a
purely theoretical account of human life what he labels a metaphysical solution
can work. Instead, meaning is bestowed on humans by the way they live:
The meaning of life is not a solution to a problem, but a matter of living in a certain way.
It is not metaphysical but ethical. It is not something separate from life, but what makes it
worth living which is to say, a certain quality, depth, abundance, and intensity of life. In
a certain sense, the meaning of life is life itself, seen in a certain way.
(T. Eagleton, The Meaning of Life, p.164)
But the meaning of life may be both metaphysical and ethical, and the four thinkers
studied in this module bring both of these aspects together. In different ways, they
understand the metaphysical (who we are) as the basis of the ethical (how we are to
behave) and see the latter as grounded in the conditions and possibilities of the former.
They will of course differ on what we can know, even if they may differ about what
we should do. This module has been designed to enable you to study four interesting
thinkers who, in different ways and with different conclusions, try to work out an
understanding of human life, its difficulties and possibilities, and point us, their readers,
towards how we should live.
Aims and objectives
By the end of this subject guide, and the relevant reading and activities, you should be
able to:
discuss each of the four thinkers and their ideas on the tasks of life
relate their views to broader concerns within philosophy and theology
relate their views to other thinkers
discuss how we might begin to define our own ideas about the tasks of life based
on the ideas of these, and other, important thinkers.
How to use this guide
There are four separate chapters on each of the four thinkers whom we will consider
chronologically:
Blaise Pascal (162362): a scientific and mathematical innovator, a literary satirist
of genius (his Provincial Letters against the Jesuits are brilliant and bitter) and an
incisive analyst of humanity and religion admired by both religious people and
atheists since the publication of his Penses in 1670. These are fragments found after
his death in which he recorded in a random way ideas, insights, arguments, religious
insights, observations of human life, dramatic cameos, and elements of an extended
Apologia for Christianity which he intended to compose.
Franz Kafka (18831924): for many people he is the characteristic voice of
twentieth century European fiction whose parables and extended novellas dramatise
the characteristic experiences of modern life: a radical uncertainty about identity and
purpose, the impersonal exercise of harsh authority, a bureaucratisation that crushes
individuality and a world in which what were originally religious themes become
distorted and impossible. He seems to write within a world where an absent God
has left traces of his presence and to show us what our present situation actually is,
rather than guide us positively as to how we should live. He may be, as he said he
was, both an end [of a particular culture] and a beginning [of another].
Simone Weil (190943): one of the most original voices in twentieth century
religious thought. Brought up atheist in France, involved in socialist activism,

she was a religious Platonist and mystic, uncomfortable with organised religion
and preoccupied with the question of how we can have access to the Good when
the conditions of our life obscure the vision of what is good. She was an austere,
troubled woman who died, almost certainly, of anorexia-induced complications at
the age of 34.
Introduction
Emmanuel Levinas (190696): the most important Jewish philosopher of the
twentieth century, and a disciple of Husserl whose phenomenology shaped Levinas

approach to religion and ethics. Levinas insisted on the priority of ethics both in
philosophy and in religion: the encounter with the other makes demands on me
which I cannot evade, and this summoning of the person towards moral responsibility
is the core of what it means to be a person. I see myself obligated with respect to the
other; consequently, I am infinitely more demanding of myself than of others.
Before you feel able to compare them, you should make sure that you understand what
each of them says. And of course you have to recognise that they are going to say things
in different ways: Pascals Penses are in fragments (the reason for this will be explained);
Weil, too, often writes short points, only occasionally extending into longer essays;
Levinas writes dense, often technical philosophy and Kafka simply writes fiction, letters
and diaries. They also write in different human and religious contexts which are important
factors in how they are to be understood: Pascal in the rigorous Augustinianism of French
seventeenth century church reform; Kafka as a German Jew in Prague in the 1910s20s;
Weil as an isolated, non-baptised Catholic of Jewish birth in 1930s France; and Levinas as
a Lithuanian Jew who spent most of his life in France responding through philosophy to
the Shoah (Holocaust). In different ways they deal with the brokenness of human life, each
seeing it differently, but they all turn this into something humanly and religiously powerful.
Reading for this subject
This subject guide provides a starting point for your study of the unit. It introduces the
main topics of the syllabus, gives you extensive advice on other texts to read and offers
some learning activities to help you develop your critical ideas about the subject.
There is no single set textbook for this unit; rather, you will need to draw on many
different works. Each chapter of this guide starts with a list of reading, divided into
Essential and Additional reading. You should read as much of the Essential reading as
possible, including especially any primary sources that are specified as Essential. For
some chapters, the Essential reading lists are quite lengthy, mainly because the reading
list contains texts which are recommended to help you complete activities. If you cannot
obtain some of these secondary sources, you can manage without them, but do try and
read as much Essential reading material as you can.
Your understanding of the subject should benefit greatly if you can also find time to look
at some Additional reading. Additional reading lists are deliberately extensive so that
you have a good chance of obtaining some material on topics that particularly interest
you; you are certainly not expected to read every item of Additional reading.
The Online Library consists

of several separate databases.
You can identify which
database holds which journal
by searching in the Journal
finder on the Online Library
homepage.
You may well need or wish to purchase some of the Essential texts, especially the
primary sources. In addition, in order to encourage you to read around the subject,
we are trying to ensure that many other readings are freely available to you. You can
find some journal articles in the Online Library.4 Other material is available from
other online sources such as Google Books. And scans of many other readings will be
downloadable from the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) for the unit, where you
can also exchange your ideas with your fellow students via the discussion forum.
Please note that the availability of readings may vary over time. Where material was
available in the Online Library or from another online source at the time of going to
press in August 2010, this is indicated in the guide. We have also noted items or reading
that we are hoping to upload to the VLE. At the time of going to press, some material
is still to be uploaded. We expect to make more material available in time, so do please
check the VLE regularly for updates.
Recommendation on study time
As the Student Handbook (available online at www.londoninternational.ac.uk/current_

students/general_resources/handbooks/theology.shtml) says: As a very rough guide,
you might expect to spend about 300 hours on each module about six hours per
week over 50 weeks, or seven and a half hours per week over 40 weeks. However, this
depends on how fast you learn, and the depth in which you intend to study each unit.
Examination
Important: The information and advice given in the following section are based on the
examination structure used at the time this guide was written. We strongly advise you to
always check the current Regulations for relevant information about the examination.
You should also carefully check the rubric/instructions on the paper you actually sit and
follow those instructions.
You will be required to answer four questions in three hours.
Sample examination paper
There is a Sample examination paper in Appendix 2.
Different texts and how to read them
In his work S/Z, the French literary critic, Roland Barthes, makes a distinction that will
be helpful when you read Pascal, Weil and Kafka. (Levinas has his own difficulties.)
On the one hand, there are works that he calls textes lisibles (readerly texts). Examples
might be classic novels by Jane Austen or Charles Dickens: an omniscient author tells
you everything you need to know about how the characters think and feel, and so you
understand them perfectly; in this fictional world, everything makes sense.
On the other hand, Barthes says, there are textes scriptibles (writerly texts) in which
this authorial omniscience is missing and the book requires the reader to enter into its
interpretation much more actively, sometimes with difficulty. Examples might be the
stories of Franz Kafka or Joseph Conrad, the plays of Samuel Beckett or T.S. Eliots
poem The Waste Land: you have to work hard in these difficult textual worlds. In some
ways, the Gospel of Mark, with its open acknowledgement of the difficulty of knowing
Jesus identity and why he must die, is a writerly text whose meaning, like Christ
himself, is not easy to discern; the disciple or someone who wants to be a disciple, has
to do a lot of work to understand the text that is Christ. Table 0.1 might help you to
understand what Barthes is saying.
Introduction
Readerly/Writerly texts
Readerly texts (Textes lisibles)
Writerly texts (Textes scriptibles)
The text seems to be transparent: we see

through it and enter a literary world in
which everything can be understood.
The text is opaque (thick) and does not

claim to explain everything. There are
gaps in understanding and so the text
resists easy reading.
The author guides the reader as to how

No definitive interpretation of the work
the work is to be read: hand yourself over is offered by the author, but the reader is
to the author and be guided.
invited to participate actively in making
sense of what the work means.
Character and motivation are easy to
identify and there is a seamless narrative
that can be followed and that makes
sense.
The characterisation and plot is

fragmented, marked by ambiguity
and perplexity: how are people to be
understood and events interpreted?
The reader is given a panoptic

perspective in which all things are
clearly seen, as it were, from above the
action.
The perspective offered to the reader is in

medias res (in the thick of things): what
is conveyed is partial and incomplete,
uncertain and messy.
The text is marked by authorial

omniscience and complete lucidity
and so the reader thinks that he/she
understands everything.
The text is marked by authorial silence

on some things, either because things are
withheld from the reader or because they
are unknown to the author.
The work is easy to read because, unlike

life, it offers a world that is coherent
and makes sense. This may be why we
like crime thrillers, romantic comedies,
anything with a happy ending.
The work is difficult to interpret and

offers an incomplete perspective. Things
are often not resolved at the end and there
is a sense of brokenness that will not be
repaired. Like life itself?
Table 0.1: Readerly/Writerly texts (Textes lisibles/Textes scriptibles)

You can see from Table 0.1 that the different kinds of texts correspond to different ways of
viewing and experiencing life. To live, says a Russian proverb, is not to walk across a
field. Another proverb from the same country says that We are born in an open field and
we die in a dark wood. Comforting? Strangely yes, because it can be consoling to find
that other people find life puzzling, difficult and not easy to discern. The four writers in
this module all have a sense that the task of living is a complex one, not easily worked out,
and usually lived out in practical, rather than theoretical, ways. The truth of God is lived
not thought is a motif which the four thinkers all explore in different ways:
1. Pascal was Catholic, a great student of St Augustine in religious matters and one of
the most incisive Christian thinkers.
2. Kafka, born Jewish but non-observant, uses religious themes often without telling
his readers that he is doing so.
3. Weil, of a non-observant Jewish family, was deeply mystical and Christian without
ever becoming a baptised member of the Church.
4. Levinas was an orthodox Jew who thought and wrote a philosophy inspired by
Jewish concerns.
You will find that studying their ideas will make you think, and think differently, about
what human life is about because they address central, difficult questions in unusual and
striking ways. This guide will present a way of reading them. How you benefit from this
study is one of the tasks of life which you may want to address.
A reminder of your learning outcomes
By the end of this subject guide, and the relevant reading and activities, you should be
able to:
discuss each of the four thinkers and their ideas on the tasks of life
relate their views to broader concerns within philosophy and theology
relate their views to other thinkers
discuss how we might begin to define our own ideas about the tasks of life based
on the ideas of these, and other, important thinkers.
Chapter 1: Blaise Pascal (162362)
Chapter 1
Blaise Pascal (162362)

Essential reading
Primary texts
Pascal, B. Penses translated by A.J. Krailsheimer (Penguin, 2003) [ISBN 0140446451;

9780140446456].
Read especially: 2526; 44; 47; 11018; 131; 136; 14849; 160; 166; 18992; 198; 199;
20001; 298; 308; 400; 405; 417; 423; 424; 427; 449; 513; 533; 608; 688; 695; 697;
699; 806; 913; 919; 933; 977.
Entretien avec M. de Sacy. (Pascals conversation with M. de Sacy at Port-Royal) translated
by J. McDade. (VLE)
Secondary texts
Krailsheimer, A.J. Pascal. (Oxford University Press, 1980) [ISBN 0192875124;
9780192875129]. Out of print, but second-hand or library copies may be available.
McDade, J. The Contemporary Relevance of Pascal, New Blackfriars 91 (2010),
pp.18596. (Online: PDF available in Wiley Online Library: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.
com/doi/10.1111/j.1741-2005.2009.01349.x/pdf)
McDade, J. Interpreting Pascals Memorial. (VLE)
O Connell, M.R. Blaise Pascal: Reasons of the Heart. (W.B. Eerdmans, 1997)
[ISBN 0802801587] (accessible biography and study of main ideas).
Additional reading
Secondary texts
Coleman, F.X.J. Neither Angel Nor Beast: the Life and Work of Blaise Pascal. (Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1986) [ISBN 0710206933; 9780710206930] [Online: Google books,
14/07/10].
Kolakowski, L. God Owes Us Nothing: A Brief Remark on Pascals Religion and the Spirit
of Jansenism. (University of Chicago Press, 1995) (superb analysis by an excellent
philosopher) [ISBN 0226450511] [Online: Google books, 14/07/10].
Krailsheimer, A.J. The Origin and Plan of the Penses in Pascal. (Oxford University Press,
1980) [ISBN 0192875124 (pbk); 9780192875129; see above] (VLE).
McDade, J. Divine Disclosure and Concealment in Bach, Pascal and Levinas, New
Blackfriars, 85 (2004), pp.12132.
Miel, J. Pascal and Theology. (Johns Hopkins Press, 1969) (still the best book on Pascals
view of grace) [ISBN 0801811015] (VLE).
Moles, E. Pascals Theory of the Heart, MLN 84 (1969), pp.54864 (excellent and
informative) [Online Library; JSTOR].
Morris, T.V. Making Sense of it All: Pascal and the Meaning of Life. (W.B. Eerdmans,
c.1992) [ISBN 080280652X (pbk)] [Online: a few pages on Amazon].
Rogers, B. The Realist of Port-Royal, Times Literary Supplement (4 Feb 2000), pp.1112
[Online: via subscription only].
Simmonds, G. What did Pascal find at Port-Royal? (VLE).
Steinmann, J. Pascal. (Burns and Oates, 1965) (a classic study) [no ISBN] (VLE).
How to read the Penses
Please note: numbers in this subject guide will be to the Pense number, not the
page number, in the Krailsheimer edition of the Penses.
It is important that you use the Krailsheimer edition which corresponds to the French
edition by Lafuma. Other editions have different numbering of the Penses and you
should avoid them; the edition by Brunschvig is earlier than Lafuma, so older books on
Pascal often use this. A more modern edition by Sellier, offering a different ordering of
the Penses, is translated in Oxford World Classics by H. Levi: avoid this because it is
incomplete and sometimes not very good.
Introduction
That Pascals Penses should have had such an impact on European intellectual life
is remarkable when one considers that it was never actually composed by Pascal as
a book. The title means Thoughts and this is the name given to it when it was first
published in 1670. Pascal had died eight years earlier; such was his reputation as a
mathematician, scientist and as an incisive religious thinker that the working notes and
fragments which he left behind were assembled, edited and published posthumously by
his friends and family.
Krailsheimers Introduction to the Penses (pp.xviiixx) describes Pascals working
method: he wrote quickly on large sheets of paper which were then torn into smaller
pieces; these were then assembled and bound together with thread. Pascal also
composed a table of contents with 28 headings corresponding to chapters in an
Apology for Christianity which he intended to write in order to counter the intellectual
drift towards atheism and indifference which Pascal detected in the emerging scientific,
critical culture of Early Modern Europe. Other Penses are simply working notes or
jottings composed at different stages on a range of religious themes. Sometimes ideas
are clustered together, and you have a sense of looking at the different aspects of a
single topic; the fact that there is no explicit link or argumentative structure means that
it is the task of the reader to piece the ideas together into something more coherent. And
this can sometimes be an engaging and challenging task. You rarely pick up the Penses
without discovering something wonderful that you havent noticed before.
Because the ordering of the Penses is somewhat haphazard and random, finding your
way through them can be frustrating: even Pascals collation of Penses on particular
themes does not assemble them all coherently. The only solution is to make your own
references to the Penses and build them up as you go along. For example: original sin
(695; 131); boredom (136; 24; 622, etc). Part of the fun in reading this work is creating
your own reading guide to the Penses.
Is this fragmented structure a weakness? Well, it means that you cannot read the
Penses as you would an ordinary book with a beginning, middle and end, but on the
other hand, the broken and succinct quality of the Penses means that they sometimes
have a more immediate impact on the reader than if they formed part of a normal text.
The directness of Pascals thought comes through with an immediacy and clarity of
voice that never seems to lose its freshness. Postmodern readers find in the genre of the
Penses a reflection of the view that we can no longer compose the large, over-arching
narratives that were once thought possible explanatory schemes that describe the
whole of history and reality: the Penses, they say, offer partial insights that reflect the
incomplete character of what we are able to know. (See McDade, The Contemporary
Relevance of Pascal.)
In many ways, the Penses are a writerly text for two reasons: firstly, they are random,
fragmented thoughts imperfectly integrated with one another and so the reader has
to do the work of connecting and interpreting them. Secondly, Pascal writes in a way
that presses the reader to reflect, sometimes radically and seriously, on just what his/
her life is about and you are pressed to think things out for yourself. This is part of
Pascals overall intention: he wanted people, especially free-thinking atheists who were
beginning to appear in European culture, to examine the truth about their condition, and
to understand themselves as caught between a high vocation to love God (this is what
Pascal will refer to as the greatness (la grandeur) of humanity; and a condition that he
refers to as wretchedness (la misre).
For Pascal, our human condition requires a dialectical account in which both of these
polarities or extremes are true about us. One of his strategies is to draw attention to
aspects of human life and experience that illustrate the complexity of human identity.
As we will see, he specialises in observation and analysis of the way we are, in order to
make us, the readers, aware of the strangeness of life as we live it; what life is and what
it could become is only one side of the story; the more powerful part of the Penses
are the sections in which human complexity and evasion are brought to the fore. Pascal
said, All the good maxims already exist in the world: we just fail to apply them (540).
Why might this be?
Textual commentaries on the Penses
Let us start reading the Penses. Here are some extracts, with a brief commentary as an
example of the kind of thinking which the Penses might stimulate in a reader:
166: We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us
seeing it.
Comment: Who exactly are we? What is the abyss spoken about? For Pascal it is
probably the nothingness of hell, but it might also have a non-religious application,
e.g. cultural decline; moral chaos. Pascal does not tell us, and his silence makes the
metaphor open-ended and therefore capable of multiple readings. And why would we
want to hide it from our sight, whatever it is? Do we know what we are doing and
where we are going?
688: What is the self? A man goes to the window to see the people passing by; if I pass
by, can I say he went there to see me? No, for he is not thinking of me in particular. But
what about a person who loves someone for the sake of her beauty; does he love her?
No, for smallpox, which will destroy beauty without destroying the person, will put an
end to his love for her. And if someone loves me for my judgement or my memory, do
they love me? Me, myself? No, for I could lose these qualities without losing my self.
Where then is this self, if it is neither in the body nor the soul?
Comment: This is an acute analysis of difficult issues about the substantiality of the
self. When we love someone, do we love them because of some physical or intellectual
quality which they possess; and if this quality goes, what happens to our love? Can we be
said to love another person (self) or are we always loving aspects of them which please
us but which may be transitory, such as physical beauty? You should read this against
the background of Pascals contemporary Ren Descartes attempt to construct the whole
of philosophy on a thinking self (I think therefore I am) whose existence cannot be
doubted and can act as the foundation for the whole of philosophy. This Pense shows
a sharp critique of Cartesianism, as well as a perceptive analysis of what goes on when
people love or claim to love someone else.
697: Those who lead disorderly lives tell those who are normal that it is they who
deviate from nature, and think they are following nature themselves; just as those who
are on board ship think that the people on shore are moving away. Language is the same
everywhere: we need a fixed point to judge it. The harbour is the judge of those aboard
ship, but where are we going to find a harbour in morals?
699: When everything is moving at once, nothing appears to be moving, as on board
ship. When everyone is moving towards depravity, no one seems to be moving, but if
someone stops he shows up the others who are rushing on, by acting as a fixed point.
Comment: These two related Penses raise the question of relativism in ethics: is there
no fixed point by which right and wrong can be assessed? Pascal thinks that there is:
Gods guidance in Scripture, Christ and the Church. But if the whole of a culture is
going to the dogs, no one will be able to notice if everything changes and deteriorates;
no one can diagnose moral decline because we are all on the same ship. Pascal is
preoccupied with the instability found in human nature: because we have lost our true
good, anything can become our good. Compare 630: Mans nature is entirely natural,
wholly animal. There is nothing that cannot be made natural. There is nothing natural
that cannot be lost. And what does he mean in 699 by someone stopping and acting as
a fixed point? Presumably it is a metaphor for a Christian following moral teachings
taught in Scripture. Pascal picks up the theme of relativism, cultural instability and
fluidity of personal identity from the Essays of Michel de Montaigne (153392) who
was a great influence on him.
806: We are not satisfied with the life we have in ourselves and our own being. We
want to lead an imaginary life in the eyes of others and so to make an impression. We
strive constantly to embellish and preserve our imaginary being, and neglect the real
one. And if we are calm, or generous, or loyal, we are anxious to have it known so that
we can attach these virtues to our other existence [our constructed, imagined self]; we
prefer to detach them from our real self so as to unite them with the other. We would
cheerfully be cowards if that would acquire us a reputation for bravery. How clear a sign
of the nullity of our own being that we are not satisfied with one without the other and
often exchange one for the other.
Comment: Pascal seems here to anticipate the postmodern view that our access to
the real is only through an image or version of the real. What does he mean by the
real self and the imagined self? How much of our sense of self is borrowed from
imagined versions of the way we are or the way we want to appear? Is it possible for
a person to invest so much in the imagined self that his or her real self is ignored
or marginalised? Think of various aspects of popular or celebrity culture: the way our
bodies should be, the way we should behave, the way to reach fulfilment. Think of the
impact of virtual and digital reality on our sense of identity and life.
Activity
Analyse 779: Children, who are scared of the face they have daubed, are just
children, but how can someone who is so weak as a child become really strong when
grown up? Only our imagination changes. Everything that grows progressively better
also declines progressively. Nothing that was once weak can ever be absolutely
strong. It is no good saying: He has grown, he has changed: he is still the same.
Analyse 44, Pascals great Pense on imagination, the dominant faculty in man.
(Surely this is against the view that our dominant faculty is reason; Pascal thinks our
nature is ruptured by sin.)
I hope these extracts show how the Penses give rise to thoughts about the way we are.
Before we go further, we should attend to the central event in Pascals life, the occasion
when he was touched by divine grace and the holiness of God.
10
Pascals Night of Fire

Reading
Pense 913; McDade, J. Interpreting Pascals Memorial; O Connell (1997), pp.95105.
This Pense is called Pascals Memorial and it records his religious experience on 23
November 1654. This is often called Pascals night of fire because the word fire is the
word that begins the account of the experience after Pascal has set the experience in the
context of the Churchs liturgical life. The text comes to us because when Pascals body
was being prepared for burial, they noticed that his doublet (waistcoat) had something
inside it and, undoing the stitching, they discovered a piece of paper and a parchment on
which Pascal had recorded his experience of God and the emotions and thoughts which
came to him. (McDade and OConnell will introduce you to the differences between the
paper and parchment versions, the Biblical sources which Pascal quotes either directly
or indirectly and some of the issues surrounding the nature of this experience which has
fascinated commentators across the centuries.)
One of the important points it makes is the sharp distinction between God as revealed
and God as thought by philosophers and scholars. On the one hand, there is the Old
Testament formula by which God presents himself to Moses (the God of Abraham,
etc (Exod. 3.15) a revelation which culminates for Pascal in the God of Jesus Christ
and on the other hand there is the God of the philosophers and scholars. God can
only be found by the ways taught in the Gospels, a phrase which is repeated later when,
in the middle of Pascals distress that he might be cut off from Christ, he writes: He
can only be kept by the ways taught in the Gospel. (Pascal was afraid that God would
withdraw his favour from him and abandon him to perdition; his dying words were,
May God not abandon me.)
This experience seems to teach Pascal that God cannot be found by intellectual
argument. It is significant that one of the insights Pascal takes from this religious
experience is that when God makes himself known and Pascal understands this
as taking place in the life of ancient Israel, in the person of Jesus Christ, in the New
Testament, in the prophecies and miracles by which God speaks well about God, in
the life of the Church and in experiences of consolation effected by divine grace this is
different from, and superior to, all our attempts to reach or think God through reason.
He is quite clear that there is a disjunction between reason and the heart: by reason
he will mean the way we use our minds to follow arguments and prove scientific
conclusions; by heart he will mean the way in which we are attentive to God. The
heart is the core of identity, open to Gods action but also our capacity to intuit first
principles and axioms in science: we sense that they are true. By heart he does not
mean an emotional intuition, but rather a direct quality of attentiveness. For example,
think of what it is like to listen to music and to be completely caught up in the flow
of sound. For Pascal, attending to God is closer to that experience than to following a
logical sequence by which we establish Gods existence. (Weil will say that prayer is
an attentiveness to God.) Pascal would probably have agreed with the statement that a
God who can be proved, by definition cannot be God, because God is not in a category
of things that can be handled by analytic reason. Remember that Pascal was a worldclass mathematician and scientist, highly skilled in the use of reason, but he was clear
that its competence was in things of the world, not in dealing with God.
According to Pascals Augustinian theology, God alone could bring people to faith;
arguments and reasoning could not be generative because the movement is from the
heart to the mind and not from the mind to the heart. Arguments addressed to the mind
could only be aimed at making human beings aware of what they are like, of their
misre and grandeur. See the programme he sets for himself in 130. Pascal was teaching
11
people how to be lucid about themselves, to induce a sense of human truthfulness;

God would do the rest, and only God could do the rest. But what he was trying to do
was give an account which could both embrace and transcend the human condition by
positing a saving way centred on Jesus Christ:
Knowing God without knowing our own wretchedness makes for pride.
Knowing our own wretchedness without knowing God makes for despair.
Knowing Jesus Christ strikes the balance because he shows us both God and our own
wretchedness. (192)
His characterisation of what a person should see about him/herself is equally dialectical:
He must not see nothing at all, nor must he see enough to think that he possesses God, but
he must see enough to know that he has lost himWhatever course he adopts, I will not
leave him in peace.
(449)
Activity
What is the difference between experience of God and thought about God? Pascal
seems to oppose them. Is he right?
Read and summarise the article by Moles on how Pascal thinks of the heart and then
comment on the following Penses:
423: The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in
countless ways.
424: It is the heart which perceives God and not reason. That is what faith is: God
perceived by the heart, not by the reason.
110: We know the truth not only through our reason but also through our heart.
298: The heart has its order, the mind has its own, which uses principles and
demonstrations. The heart has a different one. We do not prove that we ought to
be loved by setting out the causes of love; that would be absurd.
Read and Analyse 449, one of the most important Penses. Here you will find:
12
a.
Pascals distinction between a misguided version of Christian faith (worshipping

a God considered to be great and mighty and eternal, which is properly speaking
deism, almost as remote from the Christian religion as atheism); and the true
God of Christianity (a God of love and consolation, a God who fills the soul
and heart of those whom he possesses). Surely there is here an echo of the
Memorial. Notice the distinction Pascal makes between God seen by heathens
and Epicureans, God seen by Jews and God experienced by Christians. Should
these different approaches be set in opposition to one another, as Pascal seems to
do, or should they be more positively related to one another?
b.
His doubts about the value of arguments from reason about Gods existence or
the Trinity or immortality: he does not think that they will be enough to persuade
someone to believe. Is he right to say that you cannot reason towards faith?
c.
His assertion that Jesus Christ is the object of all things, the centre towards
which all things tend. See 212. Why does he say this and what does it mean?
d.
The dialectic of knowing both that there is a God and that humans are wretched
through their participation in the history of self-destructive sin. It is of equal
importance to know each of these points, but it is dangerous to know one of
them without the other. Note the centrality of Christ here: It is perfectly possible
to know God but not our own wretchedness [Pascal thinks that this is one of
the things wrong with the attempt to deal with God through reason] or our
own wretchedness without God; but it is not possible to know Christ without
knowing both God and our wretchedness alike. Christ reveals both of these
necessary truths and so we cannot understand God without him and we cannot
understand ourselves without him. Whoever knows him knows the reason
for everything. See 18992. Pense 608 is a wonderful, thoroughly Biblical,
description of the offices of Christ, what Christ does for humanity.
Boredom and diversion
Some remarks by the American novelist Walker Percy echo Pascals view of boredom as
a symptom of something seriously wrong with us:
Why is it that no other species but man gets bored? Under the circumstances in which a
man gets bored, a dog goes to sleep.
for the last two or three hundred years the self has perceived itself as a leftover which
cannot be accounted for by its own objective view of the world and that in spite of an
ever-heightened self-consciousness, increased leisure, ever more access to cultural and
recreational facilities, ever more instruction on self-help, self-growth, self-enrichment,
the self feels more imprisoned in itself no, worse than imprisoned, because a prisoner at
least knows he is imprisoned and sets store by the freedom awaiting him and the world to
be openBoredom is the self being stuffed with itself.
(Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: the Last Self-Help Book, pp.7176: The Bored Self:
Why the Self is the only Object in the Cosmos which Gets Bored.)
Walker Percy has learned from Pascal that boredom is an important symptom of our
inner life. His observations and analyses of boredom have been appreciated by readers
through the centuries as small masterpieces: 24: Mans condition is inconstancy,
boredom and anxiety. 622: Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of
complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort.
Then he faces his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness.
And at once there wells up from the depths of his soul boredom, gloom, depression,
chagrin, resentment, despair.
Pascal thinks that our natural state, as a consequence of the history of sin which we
inherit and in which we are disposed to share, is disorientation: 400: Man does not
know the place he should occupyHe searches everywhere, anxiously but in vain,
in the midst of impenetrable darkness. Through sin we have lost our true good: 397:
Since mans true nature has been lost, anything can become his nature: similarly, true
good being lost, anything can become his true good.
In the absence of a true good that satisfies us, we are irremediably bored: 136: Man is
so unhappy that he would be bored even if he had no cause for boredom, by the very
nature of his temperament, and he is so vain that, though he has a thousand and one
basic reasons for being bored, the slightest thing, like pushing a ball with a billiard
cue, will be enough to divert him. Even someone who loses his son and is caught up
in lawsuits and quarrels, Pascal says and he may be thinking of a particular person
he knew will give all his attention to hunting with his dogs for six hours. That is all
he needs, says Pascal. And as a way of avoiding the truth about ourselves, we give
our attention to activities which divert us, compulsive displacement activities that can
take our mind off things and give us temporary relief from facing up to the mess we
are in. Pense 136 is the most extended description of this and you should read it with
enjoyment and self-criticism. Enjoy too his evaluation of the bored king in 137. The
human heart may be hollow and foul (139), but it is also extremely superficial. See his
account of dreams in 803 and the confusion of what is real and what is imagined.
13
Activity
Analyse Pascals account of seeking happiness in 148.
Analyse how he views true religion and what it must teach us in 149. It is commonly
held that the opening words of this Pense, APR, stands for Port-Royal (at PortRoyal), and that this may be part of an address he gave there on how to persuade freethinkers of the truth of Christianity.
Why does he divide humanity into three sorts of people in 160? Is he right?
Pascal on the Three Orders

Reading
Penses 25, 26, 308, 513, 533, 933, 977; Krailsheimer (1980), p.48 and the following;
I Cor 1.31; 2 Cor 10.17.
Begin by reading 533, Pascals cynical, but very serious, description of politics and
power. Plato and Aristotle, he says, directed their political philosophy towards a
madhouse where deluded people imagine they are kings and emperors. This is not a
harmless joke: Pascal is a sharp analyst of the mechanism whereby political power
imposes itself on people through display, by the visual impression of greatness.
Read also his comment on lawyers in 87, 89, 90 and 104; see also 25, 26, 44 and 60
for accounts of how doctors and lawyers try to impress us. His analysis of power,
inheritance and imagination in 828 is devastating. In other important Penses, he
distinguishes between what he calls the three orders of physical display, intellectual
power and holiness.
Read 933, one version of the distinction:
The first order is that of the flesh, the body, the eyes: the carnal [= those dominated
by the senses] are rich men and kings. Things of the flesh are properly governed by
concupiscence. Understand concupiscence not sexually (Pascal does not highlight
sexual desire as the key to what is wrong with us) but as a disorder, inconsistency
and selfishness through all the dimensions of the self. We would now include the
world of celebrity in which looks determine fame and fortune.
The second order is that of intellectual inquiry, science, mathematics and conceptual
understanding: inquirers and scholars: their interest is in the mind. (The word
for scholars here is savants, the same word used in the Memorial: not the God
of the philosophers and learned (savants). Things of the mind [are governed] by
curiosity.
The third order is that of the wise: their interest is in what is right. Wisdom is the
only thing one can take pride in not in a selfish way because wisdom comes from
God. (Compare St Paul in I Cor 1.31; 2 Cor 10.17.)
When he reworks this distinction in 308, he gives a fuller account of the third order,
that of grace and holiness (note also 298). These are three orders differing in kind.
The following table outlines his ideas:
14
Order
Feature
Exemplified
in
Makes an
impact on
Impression
Effect on us
Who is affected?
The body
(le corps)
extended
in space
kings, rich
men, captains
(les charnels)
the eye
we are visually
dazzled by
displays of
power and
beauty
we become
excited,
impressed or
frightened
probably everyone,
but philosophers to
a lesser extent, and
saints even less, if
at all
The mind
(lesprit)
thought
(a nonphysical
process)
Archimedes
(Ancient
Greek
scientist)
the mind
we are
convinced
by rational
argument in
philosophy and
science
we gain
intellectual
conviction
and clarity of
understanding
intellectuals,
philosophers,
scientists. Not those
dominated by the
order of the body and
display
Holiness
(la saintt)
invisible
grace and
divine
action
Jesus Christ
and the saints
the heart:
centre of
identity and
contact with
God and
intuition of
truth
we are moved
by the signs of
holiness and
humility
we are given
gentleness of
spirit, wisdom
and spiritual gifts
only those touched

effectively by grace
(and Pascal did not
think that everyone
was); but those
dominated by the
eyes or by the
mind would not
recognise greatness
here
Table 1.1: Pascals Three Orders
Some comments on Pascals Three Orders
If you are in the order of the body, you will find it hard to see the greatness of
Archimedes because you expect to be dazzled by beauty, power and display; greatness
in argumentation will mean nothing to you. If you are in the order of the mind,
you may fail to understand why people are taken in by vacuous displays of glamour,
parades, physical beauty (or strangeness!). But because youre human, you cannot fail
to be in some measure susceptible to impressions made in the order of the body because
Pascal thinks that imagination is the dominant faculty in man, master of error and
falsehood (44). The senses deceive reason through false appearances (44); we are
prone to being misled because there is no consistent centre to our identity and we can be
thrown in every direction by views, sights, feelings, etc. The power of kings is founded
on the reason and the folly of the people, but especially on their folly (26).
Pascal is clear that there is a greatness in the order of the body; but those who are
attuned only to the dominance of display, appearance, image, will find it impossible to
appreciate the greatness that there is in the second order, that of the mind, and that found
in the third order, that of holiness. Equally, those whose dominant mode is in the second
order and who understand greatness as primarily intellectual, rational argument will
find it hard to appreciate the greatness of Jesus and the saints who make an impression
through their humility, and not through intellectual persuasion or visual display.
Why does Pascal separate these orders and why does he think that they are
discontinuous and incommensurate with one another? In part, in order to allow that
the dimension of Gods action in revelation and grace has its own autonomy: it is not a
product of human thinking and energy. As we saw in the Memorial, he makes a radical
disjunction between using rational argument to deal with the God question and Gods
action in revelation which Pascal thinks is self-authenticating. (But note the place of
15
reasoned arguments in how God deals with us in 172 also a sharp counter to force
and terror in religion. Remember that Pascal himself was outstanding in the second
order of intellectual and scientific inquiry. He is also following Descartes in holding
that the property of bodies (extension in space) is distinct from the property of mind
(thought), and of course the third element he introduces is that of divine grace which is
infinitely superior to the two other orders and is radically discontinuous with it.
Pascal affirms that there is greatness in three orders which are discontinuous with one
another and which are incommensurate. They are three orders differing in kind. Pascal
sees a threefold division in our present condition between the heart (the locus of Gods
action), the mind in its rational discursiveness and the senses. He judges that our senses
do not see the level of greatness associated with the operations of thought: so for those
attracted to worldly glory, the greatness of Archimedes means nothing; analogously,
the reason cannot see the greatness associated with the work of grace and holiness. So,
philosophy will be unable to appreciate the greatness of Christ and the saints who have
their own level of greatness. In 308, he develops this at length as a way of showing
that the heart has its order of greatness which is beyond the grasp of the reason. In this
way, Pascal, while insisting on the greatness of thought, places limitations on its scope
of judgement and leaves a space for faith and the knowledge of God which is brought
about by Gods action in the soul.
Activity
Can the heart, mind and senses be distinguished in this way? Is this too schematic?
Understand its value in relation to the distinction between faith, intellectual inquiry
and sensory impression.
Appreciate its basis in Pascals view of the heart as the seat of charity and grace and in
his scepticism about the capacity of reason to deal with God.
Evaluate his argument that there is a gulf between the action of grace and human
thought.
Comment on 118: mans greatness even in his concupiscence. He has managed to
produce such a remarkable system from it and make it the image of true charity.
God and revelation
Pascal is a highly original writer on religious matters. One of his most remarkable
writings is a letter he wrote to a young woman, Charlotte de Roannez, whom he was
directing spiritually. In it, he argues that Gods revelation is in fact simultaneously a
progressive concealment. The text of the letter and a brief commentary on it can be
found in McDade (2004).
Activity
Is Pascal right to say that it is more difficult to recognise God in Christ than before
God revealed himself in this way?
Is revelation a process of God making himself more easily known? Or is Gods
revelation in Christ accompanied by a concealment?
What if, as Pascal following Augustine seems to say, God deliberately reveals himself
only to some (probably a small number) and not to most human beings? How is
this compatible with believing that God wills all to be saved and to come to the
knowledge of the truth (1 Timothy 2.4)?
You may not like the conclusions Pascal comes to here, but is there an element of
truth in it? Does God reveal himself equally to all? Consider the issues.
16
Lost in the cosmos

Reading
Penses 198, 199, 2001.
The final sections we will consider briefly are the extended descriptions Pascal offers
of human beings lost in the cosmos, caught between two infinites whose limits they
cannot see: the infinitely vast extent of the cosmos and the infinitely minute elements
that compose matter. Remember that Pascal writes this at a time when telescopes and
microscopes were becoming instruments of scientific investigation of nature. He tries
to evoke a sense of humanity set between physical poles that cannot be accurately
determined, and he wants to use this to induce a sense of metaphysical vertigo among
unbelievers who think they have gone beyond religion. He wants them to feel unstable
in what they know and to feel too unstable in the world they inhabit so that they can be
shaken to their toes with anxiety. You can decide whether he succeeds or not when you
read 198 and 199. His writing here is magnificent he is a great prose stylist.
The famous Pense 201: The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with
dread, probably records not Pascals own thought, but an idea he wants to place in the
mind of his free-thinking reader. He is guided here by St Augustine who had written in
his commentary on the Psalms: Why do you contemplate the world with astonishment,
and not the maker of the world? You lift your eyes to the heavens and you are struck
with fear...You consider the whole of the earth and you shiver (Augustine, On Psalm
145, n.12.). Augustine had taught that the contemplation of the world gave the believer
an immediate evidence of the Creator while others stumble in the dark, and he pointed
to the infinitely small scale of insect life in ways which show that Pascal had learned
from him:
who organised the limbs of the flea and of the midge, so that they have their place in the
creation, that they have their own lives, that they have their own movement? Examine a
small animal, as small as you wish...who gave a snout to the midge to suck blood? How
small is its snout by which it drinks it! Who organised, who performed these wonders?
You are seized with astonishment and you should therefore praise the greatness of their
Maker.
(Augustine, On Psalm 148.10)
The psalmist may say that the heavens proclaim the glory of God, but Pascal does not
treat the heavens in that way quite the reverse: the world is silent. Where Augustine
used these wonders of the minute and also vast world as a proof of God, Pascal does
not treat it as a means by which people would come to know God. His treatment of the
cosmos is that its scale is meant to terrify us, not persuade us that there is a loving God.
This is a significant and original feature of how he views the triad of God, the world
and us. In a sense, the description of this kind of French seventeenth century religion
by the French Marxist Lucien Goldmann has something to commend it: it offers a
tragic view of existence characterised by a triple alienation, from the world, from the
self and from God: all three are problematic and we are unable to situate ourselves
comfortably in relation to all three. Notice, however, the significance of Pense 200: the
world may be large but through thought humans can encompass it: the physical order
is transcended in the order of mind, and as we saw in his account of the Three Orders,
mind is transcended by grace and holiness.
Activity
Evaluate Pascals treatment of the infinites in 199. Does it achieve its desired effect?
Comment on 200: man is a thinking reed, etc.
17
Summary
Pascal gives a dialectical account of our human condition, in which our capacity for
greatness (grandeur) is balanced by our subjection to frustration (misre). It is not a simple
task, then, to find our way towards fulfilment. He thinks that human life outside the work of
grace exhibits the effects of sin (see 131 and 695). This makes it very difficult for us to find
our way towards our true good and our true fulfilment. For him, one of the major symptoms
of this is our capacity for boredom and our endless desire for diversion. He thinks too
that the three orders of body, mind and grace, make it difficult for human beings to be
unified in relation to God: we are impressed by visual appearances and reasoned arguments,
often at the expense of responding to God through the heart. He holds that God makes his
presence felt by human beings, but he seems to think that this happens only to some and not
to others. But he wants human beings to recognise the truth of their condition so that we
might know better just what our position is in relation to God and fulfilment.
Learning outcomes
By the end of this chapter, and having completed the relevant reading and activities, you
should be able to:
discuss why Pascal distinguishes between the God of Abraham, etc and the God of
the Philosophers
appreciate the significance of his Memorial
discuss what he means by the three orders and its value
evaluate the merits of his argument about the two infinites in which human life is set
discuss the distinction between reason and the heart
discuss the significance which Pascal sees in boredom and diversion.
Sample examination questions

1. God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and
scholars. Discuss this distinction and why it is important for Pascal.
2. Is it helpful to distinguish between the three orders as strictly as Pascal does?
3. According to Pascal, why do we get bored?
4. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread. Discuss.
5. Is it helpful to think of the Incarnation as a concealment in which only some can
recognise God?
18
Chapter 2: Franz Kafka (18831924)
Chapter 2
Franz Kafka (18831924)

Essential reading
Primary texts
Kafka, F. The Complete Short Stories. (Vintage, 2008) [ISBN 9780749399467]. For the
purposes of this module, you should read the following stories:
Longer stories
1. Metamorphosis
2. In the Penal Colony
3. A Hunger Artist.
Shorter stories
1. Before the Law
2. An Imperial Message
3. The Knock at the Manor Gate
4. The City Coat of Arms
5. On the Tram.
Kafka, F. The Trial. (Penguin, 2000) [ISBN 9780141182902] or The Trial in The Complete
Novels. (Vintage, 2008) [ISBN 9780099518440]. (Note: the chapter from The Trial, In
the Cathedral, which includes the story Before the Law is available on the VLE).
Kafka, F. Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope and the True Way (The Zrau Aphorisms),
ed. M. Brod (VLE).
Secondary texts
Buber, M. The Knowledge of Man. (Allen and Unwin, 1965) [no ISBN], p.140 and the
following.
Feuerlicht, I. Kafkas Chaplain, The German Quarterly 39 (1966), pp.20822 (Lucid
exposition of Before the Law in its setting in The Trial).
Grzinger, K.E. The Trial and the Tradition of the Gatekeeper in the Kabbalah in Kafka and
Kabbalah. (Continuum, 1994), pp.1532. Grzingers book is a superb study relating
similarities in imagery of The Trial and Jewish mystical traditions (Kabbalah) (VLE).
Idel, M. Kabbalah: New Perspectives. (Yale University Press, 1988) [ISBN 0300038607].
Neumeyer, P.F. Franz Kafka, Sugar Baron, Modern Fiction Studies 17 (1971), pp.516,
followed by Neumeyers translation of Chapter 14 of Oskar Webers The Second Home
that, he argues, influenced Kafkas In the Penal Colony, (op. cit.), pp.1719 (persuasive
account of possible sources).
Peters, P. Witness to the Execution: Kafka and Colonialism, Monatshefte 93 (2001),
pp.40125.
Robertson, R. Kafka: A Very Short Introduction. (Oxford University Press, 2004) [ISBN
9780192804556] (excellent, informative study).
Robertson, R. Kafka: Judaism, Politics and Literature. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985)
[ISBN 0198158149 (pbk)], pp.10530 (on The Trial and Before the Law) (VLE).
Note: please be aware that the quotations from Kafka are in German in this superb study
of Kafka and Judaism.
19
Robertson, R. Edwin Muir as Critic of Kafka, Modern Language Review 79 (1984),

pp.63852 (interesting on Kafkas style of writing too).
Satz, M. and Z. Ozsvath A Hunger Artist and In the Penal Colony in the light of
Schopenhauerian Metaphysics, German Studies Review (1978), pp.20010.
Steinberg, E.R. The Judgment in Kafkas In the Penal Colony, Journal of Modern
Literature 5 (1976), pp.492514 (religious reading of this story).
Zilcosky, J. Savage Travel: Sadism and Masochism in Kafkas Penal Colony, in Kafkas
Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism and the Traffic of Writing. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)
[ISBN 0312232810; 1403967679 (pbk); 9781403967671], pp.10321 (sado-masochism
and colonialism).
Other recommended reading

Reference will be made throughout to Kafkas The Trial. A good way into it is Orson
Welles 1962 film of The Trial, outstanding in its own right and a powerful interpretation
of the novel. Also recommended is the German director Michael Hanekes film of The
Castle (1997). Both are available on DVD. Read too, J.L. Borges short story, The
Library of Babel and his essay, Kafka and his Precursors in Labyrinths (Penguin,
2000) [ISBN 0141184841 (pbk)]. Borges is inspired by Kafkas fictional style.
Additional reading
Primary texts
Kafka, F. The Blue Octavo Notebooks. (Exact Exchange, 1991) [ISBN 1878972049].
Kafka, F. Letters to Friends, Family and Editors. (John Calder, 1978) [ISBN 0714537012].
Secondary texts
Alter, R. Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin and Scholem.
(Harvard University Press, 1991) [ISBN 0674606639].
Fowler, D. In the Penal Colony: Kafkas Unorthodox Theology College Literature (1979)
6/1, pp.11320: a very Christian reading of the story, challenged by P. Neumeyer, Do
not teach Kafkas In the Penal Colony, College Literature 6/2 (1979), pp.10312
(Fowler is probably wrong but worth considering).
Gross, R.V. Kafkas Short Fiction in Preece, J. (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Kafka.
(Cambridge University Press, 2002) [ISBN 0521663148], pp.8094.
Horowitz, R. Kafka and the Crisis in Jewish Religious Thought, Modern Judaism 15
(1995), pp.2133.
Janouch, G. Conversations with Kafka. (New Directions, 1971) and (Quartet, 1985) [ISBN
070433481X] (probably an embellished, fictional account but highly regarded by Max
Brod and Dora Diamant who knew Kafka well (extracts on VLE)).
Kelman, J. A Look at Franz Kafkas Three Novels in And the Judges Said: Essays.
(Polygon, 2008) [ISBN 1846970520 (pbk); 9781846970528 (pbk)], pp.266336.
Mairowitz, D.Z. and R. Crumb Introducing Kafka. (Icon Books, 2007) (Crumb is a master
artist in the genre of graphic novels; the images of Kafkas stories are very striking).
Moses, S. Gershom Scholems Reading of Kafka: Literary Criticism and Kabbalah, New
German Critique 77 (1999), pp.14967 (opens up interesting Jewish perspectives).
Norris, M. Sadism and Masochism in In der strafkolonie [In the Penal Colony] and
Ein Hungerkunstler [A Hunger Artist], MLN 93 (1978), pp.43047 (theory-guided
comparison of two stories of publicly observed pain: useful in parts).
Oates, J.C. Kafkas Paradise, The Hudson Review 26 (197374), pp.62346 (an excellent
creative reading of Kafka by a modern American novelist).
Robert, M. Franz Kafkas Loneliness. (Faber and Faber, 1982) [ISBN 057111945X].
20
Robertson, R. In Search of the Historical Kafka: A Selective Review of Research 198092,

Modern Language Review 89 (1994), pp.10737.
Robertson, R. Kafkas Zrau Aphorisms, Oxford German Studies 14 (1983), pp.7391.
Ryan, M.P. Samsa and Samsara: Suffering, Death and Rebirth in The Metamorphosis,
The German Quarterly 72 (1999), pp.13352 (a possible Schopenhauer influence in this
story).
Stach, R. Kafka: The Decisive Years. (Harcourt, 2005) [ISBN 0151007527 (hbk);
9780151007523 (hbk)] (important study of Kafkas life and work between 191015
when he wrote Amerika, Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony and The Trial).
Stern, J.P. and J.J. White Paths and Labyrinths. (University of London: Institute of Germanic
Studies, 1985) [ISBN 0854571248].
Wagenbach, K. Kafka. (Haus Publishing, 2003) [ISBN 1904341020 (pbk); 1904341012
(hbk)] (a short biography with fine insights into the stories and their relation to Kafka
himself).
Websites
The Kafka Project by Mauro Nervi: www.kafka.org/index.php?project for some Kafka

short stories online, including translations into English.
Introduction
Franz Kafka is for many people the characteristic voice of twentieth century European
fiction, but because he is neither a philosopher nor a theologian, why study him in this
module? As we shall suggest later, there is good reason to think of him as an unusual
and original religious thinker characteristic of post-religious European secularity. Alter
writes:
What Kafka sought to do was to convert the distinctive quandaries of Jewish existence
into images of the existential dilemmas of mankind as suchhis stories are repeatedly
and variously concerned with questions such as exile, assimilation, endangered
community, revelation, commentary, law, tradition and commandment. These themes are
often made to reflect the neurotic obsessions that tormented Kafka, but not necessarily
with a diminution of their universal implications, and sometimes Kafka articulates them
as general reflections on culture and theology, especially in the shorter pieces.
(Alter, 1991, p.53)
His parables and extended novellas dramatise the characteristic experiences of modern
life: radical uncertainty, the impersonal exercise of harsh authority, a bureaucratisation
that crushes individuality and a world in which originally religious themes become
distorted, inevitable and impossible. While a Biblical parable points to some definite
meaning, Kafkas parables point to a world without definite values (Feuerlicht (1966),
p.216). Stach writes about The Trial:
Here Kafkas private dream merges with the nightmare of modernity: the virtual
expropriation of life taking place behind all our backs. No matter what choices we make,
we remain a case for whom rules, regulations and institutions already exist. Our most
spontaneous stirrings remain within the cage of a world that is thoroughly organized and
determined.
(Stach, 2005, pp.47677)
Kafka seems to capture the anxious vulnerability of an individual struggling under the
presence of an inscrutable authority that governs them and from which they cannot
free themselves. Organised and oppressive bureaucracy; excessive demands made
on individuals; family life which damages its members: these are some of the themes
Kafka deals with. He seems to many people to offer in his stories insights into how
21
structures and systems act against the human good, even positive institutions like the
family. Robertson writes that the family, for Kafka, is the place where power, guilt, law
and punishment originate (Robertson, 2004, p.72). In a letter to his sister Elli, Kafka
writes about the dynamics in family life:
The family is an organism, but an extremely complex and unbalanced one [in which
there is] the monstrous superiority in power of the parents vis--vis the children for
so many years Thus tyranny or slavery, born of selfishness, are the two educational
methods of parents; all gradations of tyranny or slavery. Tyranny can express itself as
great tenderness (You must believe me, since I am your mother) and slavery can express
itself as pride (You are my son, so I will make you into my saviour). But these are two
frightful educational methods, and likely to trample the child back into the ground from
which he came.
(Letters to Friends, 1978, pp.29596)
If forms of manipulation can be instilled into us from an early age by those who love us,
no wonder human beings find living complicated. The modern Scottish novelist, James
Kelman relates Kafkas preoccupation with authority and guilt to what we experience as
children growing up in a world whose rules are opaque:
An individual is confronted by authority from birth. One reason why children have such a
highly developed sense of injustice is because they are frequently breaking rules of whose
existence they are unaware. In general they know these mysterious rules may exist, it is
particular cases that present problems. This is why many children go around as though
expecting a sudden retribution, a sudden strike of the hand from an adult. In a sense
growing up is an exercise in hermeneutics [the science of interpretation].
(Kelman, 2002, p.272)
If we remember too that themes of authority, retribution, rules, justice and injustice, and
related ideas in Kafka about guilt, innocence, power, incomprehension and judgement,
are also powerful ideas in the Jewish and Christian religions, you can begin to sense
that there are at least implicitly religious themes floating around the issues which Kafka
raises often in a non-religious way. He will give us questions about the reality of our
lives rather than answers about how to live better, and that is no bad thing. Truth and
honesty are the basis of a proper life, even if they cannot be determined easily.
If Kafka does not give us clear answers, he certainly points us to important questions
in the simplest form possible, namely through stories and parables that anyone can
read but which reflective readers will enjoy more than others. Jewish story-telling is
alive and well in Kafkas fiction, and you should be aware that in this style of religious
discourse, parables can be remarkably creative instruments of religious teaching. The
philosophical and theological scaffolding that supports Kafkas stories is not visible, but
it is there to be investigated and his stories do raise issues that are of ultimate concern
to human life. Read the stories; attend to their details; do the work of interpretation
and think of what the wider significance of the story might be. Re-reading the stories
after reading the interpretations of them by critics is important: you will see things
which you did not spot first time round. Welcome to the world of Kafka.
Activity
What quandaries of existence does Kafka address?
Analyse his account of the dynamics in a family and Kelmans development of his
ideas.
22
Stories and meanings
Kafka is a writer of highly imaginative fiction, neither a philosopher nor a theologian,

but it is what his stories suggest as interpretations of human life that draws philosophers,
religious and non-religious thinkers to his work. You may decide after reading him that
you dont like him, but you will find that his unusual perspective will stay with you
and you will be aware of traces of Kafkas ideas in the way you subsequently think;
obviously this will depend on the scale of imaginative involvement you foster. Edwin
Muir (who first translated Kafka into English) said:
The problem with which all Kafkas work is concerned is a moral and spiritual one. It is a
twofold problem: that of finding ones true vocation, ones true place, whatever it may be,
in the community; and that of acting in accordance with the will of heavenly powers. But
though it has those two aspects it was in his eyes a single problem; for a mans true place
in the community is finally determined not by secular, but by divine, law, and only when,
by apparent chance or deliberate effort, a man finds himself in his divinely appointed
place, can he live as he should.
(Introductory note to The Great Wall of China (Secker, 1933), p.xii)
But what if divine law is not available to us now? It might have been available in the
past: Kafka was very interested in the pre-modern Jewish traditions of Eastern Europe
which he came into contact with. But as Muir pointed out, In The Castle and The Trial
[Kafkas two greatest novels], the postulates [Kafka] begins with are the barest possible;
they are roughly these: that there is a right way of life, and that the discovery of it
depends on ones attitude to powers which are almost unknown (Introductory note
to The Castle (1930), emphasis added; compare Robertson, 1984). Now if there is a
right way of life and finding it depends on how one regards powers, it will be difficult
to find that way of life if those powers are unknown. Muirs own comment on Kafka
is eminently Kafkaesque: He is a great story-teller because there is no story for him
to tell; so that he has to make it up (Robertson (1984), p.650; the whole article is very
informative about the kind of writer Kafka is).
Perhaps our situation, as Kafka sees it, is that there is a right path but it is not given to
us to know what it is. Or, as he put it in one of his aphorisms: There is a goal, but no
way. What we call the way is hesitation. A strange remark, but it encapsulates Kafkas
sense that our condition is one that is not capable of fulfilment. One can compare this
with a similar remark by Weil: This world is a closed door. It is a barrier, and at the
same time it is the passage-way (Notebooks II, 1991, p.491).
Activity
What might Kafka mean by hesitation here? Well, we often hesitate before we do
something because we dont know what we are to do or how we are to do it. But we
know that something is to be done, whatever it is and however it is to be done. And
so our way is marked by uncertainty. Does this tell us something about what our
condition is? Possibly. It is certainly characteristic of Kafka: Kafkaesque, as we
now say.
Weve already started interpreting Kafka, and you will have seen that the interpretation
depends upon the work that you do as the reader. Kafka, as well see below, is not an
omniscient guide, illuminating all aspects of life and its puzzles. How Kafka might have
understood hesitation might be illuminated by a diary entry he made on 24 January
1922, two years before his death from tuberculosis: Hesitation before birth. If there
really is such a thing as the transmigration of the soul, then I have not yet attained the
23
lowest stage. My life is the hesitation before birth. It gives a sense that Kafka did not
think that his life was substantial or significant, at least not yet. But you as a reader
are interested not only in what Kafka might have meant by it, but how in its denseness
(opacity) it might be interpreted by you in a way that throws some light on the way you
are and what tasks your life has to face.
Compare this aphorism with another statement he makes:
I was not lead into life by the sinking hand of Christianity, like Kierkegaard, nor did I
catch the last tip of the Jewish prayer-shawl before it flew away, like the Zionists. I am the
end or the beginning.
(Quoted in Wagenbach, 2003, p.viii)
In this remark, Kafka presents himself as drawn neither to Christian faith (sinking
hand is not a compliment) although Kierkegaard was one of his favourite Christian
writers nor to the revisionist, land-centred version of Judaism offered by Zionism.
(See Robertson, 2004, p.107 and the following for Kafka on Christianity and Judaism;
Wagenbach, 2003, pp.2427.) Precisely because Kafka was an original religious
thinker, one needs to grasp his thought on its own terms before relating it to other
systems (Robertson, 1994, p.119).
Partly through his contact with the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber and through
his contact with East European Hasidic communities and Yiddish theatre groups, he
became interested in Judaism. His Zrau Aphorisms, composed towards the end of
his life are probably the closest he came to working out rules for living and accessing
truth. (Robertson (1983) will introduce them to you.) Although drawn towards the end
of his life to Jewish traditions, if not to Jewish religious observance and belief his
final lover, Dora Diamant, was a strong influence on him in these matters Kafka
retained the secrecy of an inner sanctum of personal identity that did not open itself to
an identification with the social aspects of religion. (You might see a parallel with Weil
who also shared this sense of isolation.)
By describing himself as end or beginning, Kafka seems to sense that he is at the
last stages of a particular cultural development (before and after World War I) and at
the start of something different. What he will do in his stories is to draw upon inherited
traditions of popular and direct story-telling (he draws upon powerful Jewish themes
from central Europe but was not himself religiously Jewish) and at the same time to
cast an individual light on central questions of identity and meaning. The danger which
interpreters face is that they may read too much into the stories, making Kafka more of
a systematic thinker, either culturally or religiously, than he actually was. But there is no
denying the incisiveness of his attempt to say where we are, humanly and culturally.
Occasionally, the sharpness of his imagery takes your breath away as he tries to describe
the state of human life:
Seen with the terrestrially sullied eye, we are in the situation of travellers in a train
that has met with an accident in a tunnel, and this at a place where the light of the
beginning can no longer be seen, and the light of the end is so very small that the gaze
must continually search for it and is always losing it again, and, furthermore, both
the beginning and the end are not even certainties. Round about us, however, in the
confusion of our senses, or in the supersensitiveness of our senses, we have nothing but
monstrosities and a kaleidoscopic play of things that is either delightful or exhausting
according to the mood and injury of each individual. What shall I do? or: Why should I do
it? are not questions to be asked in such places.
(The Blue Octavo Notebooks, 1991, p.15)
24
Activity
Analyse Muirs interpretation of Kafkas central idea and how he thought of Kafkas
fiction (see Robertson, 1984).
Is hesitation a useful way of characterising our condition?
Can be religious without being personally involved in the practice of a religion.
What then would be the meaning of religious?
What might Kafka mean by saying (above) that we are in the situation of travellers in
a train crash and therefore ethical questions cannot be asked? Why not?
Religion in Kafka?
Reading
Moses (1999); Grzinger (1994).
Kafka instructed his friend Max Brod to burn all his writings after his death; only
a small number of short stories by Kafka were published during his lifetime. Brod
refused to obey Kafkas instructions, and became responsible for publishing the rest
of his work, including his three large novels, The Trial, The Castle and Amerika (The
Man who Disappeared). He then promoted an image of Kafka as an explicitly religious
teacher, making Kafkas writings serve his own aim of revitalising modern Judaism in
association with Zionism and insisted on deriving from them a positive message that
other readers failed to find (Robertson in Wagenbach, 2003, p.viii).
Brod promoted a religious reading of the stories which are viewed as religious
allegories: for example, Joseph K. in The Trial is portrayed as being pursued by a divine
justice that he does not understand, and the Land Surveyor in The Castle is searching
for Divine Grace; these are too glib and programmatic to be satisfactory readings of
these subtle texts, but you may find this perspective attractive. Another friend of Kafka,
Gustave Janouch, offered a hagiographical account of Kafka in his Conversations with
Kafka, portraying him as a mystical sage delivering masterly judgements on a range
of issues; although Brod thought it was authentic, modern scholars doubt the accuracy
of this portrayal. (An interesting extract is on the VLE.) Against this, Scholem and
Benjamin, two great Jewish scholars, make him a post-religious writer portraying a
world in which God is absent, or where there are still traces of a (now absent) God
(Robertson, 2004, p.111; Horowitz, 1995). This has much to commend it. It is worth
reading Stphane Moses words carefully:
Gershom Scholem had a lifelong fascination with Franz Kafkas oeuvre, in which he saw
a paradigmatic image of the spirit of our age: the meticulous presentation of a world void
of the idea of the divine, yet one in which immanence itself must be read as the inverse of
a lost transcendence. A theological reading of Kafka? Not, in any case, in the sense Max
Brod had in mind in his attempt to understand Kafka using positive religious categories.
For Brod, The Trial and The Castle symbolize two different approaches to a quest for
God. In Scholems view, it is this very notion that Kafkas oeuvre radically questions,
mirroring rather the spirit of an age for which the very idea of a divine presence in the
world had lost all meaning.
(Moses, 1999, p.149)
For Scholem, Kafka represented an instance borderline to be sure in the history of
Revelation. God is undeniably absent in Kafkas world, yet the marks he has left are
still visible enough that they need only be decoded to discover the place to which he has
withdrawn behind the scenes of a Law that has become incomprehensible, but which
continues to rule the conscience of modern man.
(op.cit., p.155)
25
Other lines of interpretation favour a more secularist, non-religious reading, a

psychological analysis of his imagination, an existentialist, Sartrian reading in terms of
the elimination of freedom, or a version that makes him a prophet of twentieth century
totalitarianism. There is a complexity about the quest for the historical Kafka which
should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with New Testament criticism (Robertson
(1994) surveys the trends). Adler gives a taste of the significance attributed to Kafka:
No author has done more to formulate the myth of the twentieth century than Kafka. He
compresses the centurys anxieties into grotesque images deeply imbued with cultural
associations, yet shockingly new in conception: the court, the castle, the torture machine, the
human beetle, the hunger artist. Into these visionary emblems, he condenses our continuing
dilemmas: bureaucracy and barbarism, capital and the expense of the soul, patriarchy
versus the liberal idea, and the doomed will to transcendence. The Trials conjoining of evil
with metaphysics has turned the novel into a symbol of the age that has not only amassed
the forces of darkness, but actually worships the evil which it professes to despise. As
K. gloomily recognizes, the lie has been turned into the world order. Such prophecy is
essentially biblical, yet, paradoxically, Kafka creates his myth by turning his own sensibility
as a German-speaking Prague Jew, an outsider at the edge of Empire, into the central focus
of his work.
(Jeremy Adler, Stepping into Kafkas Head, TLS , 13 Oct 1995)
What did Kafka want to do in his stories? In a letter of 1904, when he was 21, he wrote:
If youre surveying a life like that, which towers higher and higher without a gap, so high
you can hardly reach it with your field glasses, your conscience cannot settle down. But
its good when your conscience receives big wounds, because that makes it more sensitive
to every twinge. I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If
the book were reading doesnt wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading it
for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely
if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we would
write ourselves if we had to. But we need the kind of books that affect us like a disaster,
that grieve us deeply like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being
banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the
frozen sea inside us.
(Quoted in Wagenbach, 2003, p.42)
It will be up to you to decide whether Kafkas books have this effect. We will look
mainly at a selection of shorter stories or parables by Kafka, but first we should
consider the case that Grzinger (1994) makes that Kafka is intelligible only against a
background of Jewish beliefs:
Kafkas [The] Trial, The Judgment, In the Penal Colony and several other scattered
fragments treating the theme of judgment were written under the direct influence of the
Jewish High Holy Dayswhen all people stand before the Divine Throne of Judgment
[Kafka] is working from the direct context of a Jewish theology of judgment and sin; in
other words, from a religious context. This context presupposes a transcendental, divine
court of law whose decisions have a direct effect upon human life.
(pp.18384)
Kafka knew Hasidic and Kabbalistic teachings through his friend Georg Langer who
was familiar with the work of the Palestinian seventeenth century Kabbalist de Vidas,
a well known classic of edification literature in Eastern Europe even in Kafkas time.
Traces of its influence can still be seen in the narrative tradition of that regions folk
literature (Grzinger, p.16). There are strong echoes of de Vidas teachings in Kafkas
primary metaphor of judgment: one must live in constant fear of the judgement
hovering over a person every day and every hour (de Vidas). The celestial court,
26
portrayed in popular Jewish teaching, has the power to intervene in everyday human
life at any time via disease and all sorts of other afflictions; its verdict can occasionally
be postponed, or else it leads immediately to death (p.19). Is it any surprise then that
in The Trial, the painter Titorelli tells Joseph K., Everything is part of the court. In
the chapter The Fear of God, in The Beginnings of Wisdom, de Vidas begins with the
words:
Judgment looms over the world every day [and man] does not know when his judgment
will begin. [It may happen that] he sits in his house and his judgment begins, or he leaves
the house and goes outside and his judgment begins, and he does not know whether he
will come back homefor the judgment goes before him.
This is Kafkas world, says Grzinger, but transposed into a modern, secular setting
without explicit reference to God. Everyday, everything can bear witness against a
person: this is what happens to Joseph K. and he does not understand the truth of the
[religious] context in which he lives. For Grzinger, Kafkas fiction is imbued with the
Hasidic and Kabbalistic theme that human life is anchored in constant judgment. The
influence of the Highest Court (God) extends through all the aspects of the worlds
history and so, when Kafka describes the labyrinthine workings of the court in The
Trial, when Joseph K. is unable to understand the charge against him, he is giving a
fictional equivalent of this religious world in which man is subject to divine judgement
in all parts of his life. The reason Kafka makes such an impression on non-religious and
post-religious people is that he is giving them a fictional equivalent to religious themes
common to Judaism and Christianity. No one sees the religious scaffolding that supports
this fictional building, but, says Grzinger, it is there and it is the basis of what Kafka
was doing:
The labyrinthine court, the confusions, the night and the smut of the courts are thus Gods
rule in the world. Against this background, any search for nihilism in Kafkas prose
misses the point. The perception and appreciation of the fact that man is abandoned to this
court is tantamount to a perception and understanding of God and His authority.
(p.184)
Activity
In the light of this discussion, comment on Kafkas diary entry on 28 September 1917
(two days after Yom Kippur):
To death therefore would I consign myself. The remnants of a faith. Return to the
Father. Great Day of Atonement.
If I really examine my ultimate goal, it turns out that what I actually want is not
to be a good person and meet the demands of the highest court [authors emphasis],
but rather just the opposite, to survey the whole community of animals and men, to
understand their basic preferences, desires, moral ideals, to reduce them to simple
rules and then to shape myself as soon as possible in their mold so that I would
become totally pleasing to all, and in fact (this is the perversity of it) so pleasing that
I might finally commit all the dirty doings inside of me openly without forfeiting
their love, all the while still remaining the only sinner who wont burn. All told then,
my only concern is the human court [authors emphasis] and whats more, I want to
deceive it, but without deception.
(Quoted in Grzinger, 1994, p.27)
Summarise the main features of Grzingers approach.
Does this religious reading of Kafka rule out other readings?
What might be meant by saying that there are traces of God, and that is all that is
available to us now?
27
Some stories
Refer back to Different texts and how to read them presented in the introductory
chapter to the subject guide. Kafka is clearly a writer of writerly texts that require you
to do the work. Remember this as you go through the following stories, and be open to
the possibility that they can be interpreted in different ways.
On the Tram
See Robertson, (2004), p.28. Some pointers from McDade:
The narrator does not tell you who he (presumably masculine) is, where the scene
is, when it takes place. You are not helped to situate the scene in any significant
way, except that the juddering of the tramcar becomes a metaphor for the instability
which the person experiences.
Why should the person be required at all to justify why he is there? Who might
ask for this? Nobody, we are told; but he feels he should. And why should he feel
this way at all? Has something happened to cause this? Again, no explanation, but
we are surely meant to understand that this is not a consequence of something that
happened immediately before. (Or perhaps something did happen which triggered
off this feeling were not told.) But surely this ordinary feeling is meant to
have wider significance and to touch on the reason for this persons existence. It
would then be ontological, touching on the level of being or reality, and would
be a glimpse of how insecure human identity is: unstable, subject to no forensic
explanation, defenceless at the level of reality.
Robertsons view is surely correct that the scene conveys the sense that the world is an
entity requiring some moral? legal? religious? justification for its existence and that
justification has now vanished, or become impossible to find (p.28). Remember that in
the religious tradition, the justification of the world is that God makes the world be: if
God is why the world is, then, using Robertsons phrases above, as far as this person
is concerned, this God has now vanished or become impossible to find. So this little
scene becomes charged with metaphysical meaning and the anxiety of the passenger is a
metaphor for an anxiety at the level of reality.
We know that Kafka read Nietzsche. (Read Robertson, 2004, p.104 and the
following where you will find Nietzsches famous parable of the madman
proclaiming to the population that God is dead.) Does Kafkas little cameo on the
tram recall the ontological change caused by the absence of God in our culture?
(Where are we going? Is there still an above and a below?) Is it too fanciful to see
Kafkas story as an accessible parable about what happens to human beings when
they lose a sense of their place in an intelligible cosmos made by divine love? Its up
to you to decide whether were reading things into Kafka, but dont rule it out.
Activity
Is Kafka right to focus on anxiety as a characteristic feature of our modern life?
If there is no God, does anxiety increase or diminish?
A Knock at the Manor Gate
Before you read this, ask yourself if you have ever feared that by committing a small
transgression, of no real consequence, devastating and disproportionate consequences
could follow. What if you were found guilty without knowing what you had done
wrong, all at the hands of an impersonal agency that condemned you? The stuff of
nightmares? Certainly, but also a reality in recent European history. Kafkas little story
might have wider significance. Read it and then consider the following points:
28
What happens? The narrators sister really knocks on the door? Are you sure? Is the
narrator sure? Perhaps nothing happened at all, but there are consequences that
is clear. We are told of the narrator only that he is from the city and is now in the
country where he doesnt understand whats going on, but neither do we and that
may be an important feature of the story.
Where does the story begin? In the sunshine of the country. And where does it end?
In a prison without any prospect of release. How does the narrator get there? He is
caught by horsemen who capture him without explanation and he is taken before a
judge.
No one is named, except for the silent assistant; does this anonymity matter?
We know the names neither of the brother nor the sister, nor the judge, nor the
horsemen, nor any of the villagers. They seem to understand that something terrible
is going to happen to this city man and his sister. Why? We dont know, but with
gestures they try to warn them of the judgement that will come upon them. The
judge too knows the outcome will be bad. His is the only piece of direct speech, Im
really sorry for this man. The brother will be imprisoned not because he has done
something wrong but because of his relation to his sister who may or may not have
done something wrong. So a lifetime sentence will be delivered on someone who
has done nothing wrong and no explanation will be offered.
Notice that the room of the farmhouse has bare walls, one of which has an iron ring,
presumably for tying up the prisoner and an indeterminate object in the middle, half
a pallet, half an operating table, where torture presumably will take place.
In this little story, Kafka captures the history of the twentieth century; nameless,
impersonal forces wreaking brutal judgement on the innocent without justification.

Are we reading too much into it? You decide, but the details at the end are not
accidental and point towards a wider context.
In the Penal Colony

Reading
Translation available online at The Kafka Project; Steinberg (1976); Robertson (2004),
pp.8889; Zilcosky (2003); Peters (2001).
This is one of his finest, but most painful, stories, full of violence coldly described and
horrible in its precision. You will be shocked by it, but it has to be read because it is
one of the great parables of modern literature. There are masochistic elements to it in
addition to other features, and indeed the combination of cruelty and quasi-religious
elements leads Robertson and Pasley to suggest that the whole portrayal is influenced
by Nietzsches description of religion as a Heils-Maschinerie (Salvation-mechanism)
and from Nietzsches account of cruelty as an intrinsic part of religion, an occasion for
public festivities and an indispensable means of imprinting moral commands on the
unreceptive memory of human beings (Robertson, 1985, p.153 and the following). It
was written at the same time as The Trial, and The Flogger chapter of that novel shows
a similar struggle between the brutality of the imagery and the writers need to control
it. Many readers see In the Penal Colony as a fictional anticipation of the brutality
of twentieth century history; possibly, but there are other details which make this
interpretation less likely as a reading of what Kafka intended. As we will see, it can be
read in various ways. When his publisher received the story, he told Kafka of his horror
and distress on reading it. Kafkas reply is important as a partial justification for the
content of the story:
29
Your disapproval of its distressing aspect accords completely with my view, although I
feel that way about almost everything I have written to date. Please bear in mind how few
things are free of this distressing aspect in one form or another. By way of clarifying this
last story, I would only add that distress is not peculiar to this story alone, but that our
times in general and my own time have been distressing as well, and continue to be so,
my own for an even longer period than the times in general.
(Quoted in Stach, 2005, p.481)
According to Stach, it begins as an idea from Dostoievskis Crime and Punishment: a

guilty man who cannot endure his guilt imposes himself on his judge until the judge
finally puts an end to the dreadful game (ibid.), giving Kafka the idea of self-inflicted
justice, self-castigation. It is a recurring theme in Kafka that the primary metaphor for
our human condition is that we stand under a harsh judgement, and there is uncertainty
about the nature and justice of that judgement. Guilt is never to be doubted, says the
officer in the story when asked if the accused had any means of defending himself.
Grzinger (1994) points out that this story and The Trial were written under the direct
influence of the Jewish High Holy Days, when all people stand before the Divine throne
of Judgement. Whenever Kafka speaks [in these stories] of judgment, sin, atonement
and justification, he is working from the direct context of a Jewish theology (p.183).
What if, Kafka may have thought, we take the idea of a man who is impelled by
psychological forces to punish himself brutally, instead of waiting for the judgment to
fall in some way and at some time in the future? And what if we set this in a colonial
prison where there is an elaborate mechanism for inscribing the law that has been
broken on the body of the guilty? An imagined account of how Kafka may have
developed the idea, of course, but you will see that it expands into something more
complex. The first important question is whether there is a religious significance in
the story, and then the second is how this might relate to the manifest cruelty of the
narrative. Four interpretations are offered:
Interpretation 1. Robertson (1985), p.153 and the following: the contrast is between
a closely knit community of the past, united by the focus of a ceremony which
administers justice in an atmosphere of religious awe and a modern society in which
religious practices are given a marginal place but no longer give meaning even to the
voluntary deaths of their adherents:
the old Commandant suggests the God of the Old Testament (Jehovah)
the message which the machine inscribes on the body recalls the Ten
Commandments by being termed a Gebot (commandment)
the squiggles and curlicues around it may suggest the minutely detailed
commentaries with which the Talmudists surrounded the Torah
the death on the machine leads to an understanding of ones offence at the sixth
hour which may recall Jesus death on the cross at this hour.
Extreme suffering may give meaning to death and leads to an understanding

unattainable by any other means. What Kafka is doing in In the Penal Colony, then, is
imagining what an organic community based on religion would be like. It would give
meaning to an individuals life at the cost of extreme suffering (Robertson in Stern, J.P.
and J.J. White (eds) Paths and Labyrinths, p.33).
Interpretation 2. Steinberg (1976): it is clear that the old Commandant is a god who
always used to do the explaining; the drawings he left should not be touched by
anyone with unclean hands such as the explorer. When the explorer says that he cannot
make out the script, the officer replies, Its no calligraphy for school children. It needs
to be studied closelythere have to be lots and lots of flourishes around the actual
30
script. Remarks like these point to the Torah and the Talmud (the written form of the
Oral Torah). The old Commandant is the God of contemporary Judaism, the God of
the Old Testament, or the God of orthodox Judaism or again, all three, while the new
Commandant represents the new Christian dispensation or the God of reform Judaism.
But the puzzle is the role of violence in this contrast.
Interpretation 3. Satz and Ozsvath (1978): the story is inspired by Schopenhauers
view of the saint and focuses primarily on the officer who is taken to express
Schopenhauers view of sacrifice: Sacrifice signifies resignation generally, and the
rest of nature has to expect its salvation from man who is at the same time priest and
sacrifice.
Interpretation 4. Neumeyer (1971); Zilcosky (2003); Peters (2001): the sadomasochistic elements are related to reports of colonial cruelty which Kafka had read.
The unceasing act of inscription closely matches the particularly unrelenting nature of
colonial conquest (Peters, p.417). The officers martyrdom exposes the hypocrisies of
the new colonialism (Zilcosky, p.114). In the October 1907 edition of the popular
German satirical magazine Simplicissimus, we can see a caricature showing a colonial
apparatus much like the one in Kafkas [In the] Penal Colony; while a missionary
reads from a Bible, a British officer feeds an African into a giant vice, which squeezes
gold out of him (Peters, p.411). Neumeyer is particularly persuasive on the source of
the story in Kafkas reading. See also Zilcoskys account of Mirbeaus Torture Garden
(pp.11011 and notes).
How to read this story? It is the most elusive of all because it brings together a
graphically realised cruelty and a structure that invites a certain religious reading.
Kafkas comment in a letter to one of his lovers may be relevant: Sometimes I believe I
understand the Fall of Man as no one else (Letters to Milena (Schocken Books, 1953),
p.167).
Activity
Read In the Penal Colony again in the light of the different interpretations.
Is the joint presence of religious symbolism and masochistic cruelty significant or
simply a jarring juxtaposition of incompatible elements?
Try to express why this story is so powerful.
Before the Law

Reading
Translation available online at The Kafka Project; Robertson (1985), pp.12130.
This is one of Kafkas finest and most important parables. It is perhaps the supreme
moment in Kafkas writing, thanks to its Old Testament plainness and economy and
to the final peripeteia [ending], which wholly transforms the readers understanding
of it (Robertson, 1985, pp.12223). Should we assume that the parable has only one
meaning? Probably not: its very ambiguity and variety of possible meanings make it
susceptible to being read in different ways. The priest says to Joseph K. when they
discuss the meaning of the parable: The proper understanding of a thing and the
misunderstanding of the same thing are not always mutually exclusive.
Although autonomous, the story is included in The Trial and put in the mouth of the
priest who meets Joseph K. in the Cathedral. (Feuerlicht (1966) is good on the figure
of the Chaplain.) This whole chapter is on the VLE and you should read it carefully,
noting:
31
The symbolism of the Cathedral setting: light and darkness (torch, candles, light
through the window; the painting of the burial of Christ. Kafkas imagery comes
from Nietzsches story of the madman who declares God dead. Kafka has taken
from this passage the motifs of gathering darkness, the need for artificial light by
day (K.s pocket-torch), and the burial of God (Robertson, 1985, p.122). (You can
find Nietzsches story online at www.age-of-the-sage.org/philosophy/friedrich_
nietzsche_quotes.html (last accessed 03/08/10) and elsewhere).
The ambiguities of the story itself: see below.

The interpretation of the parable offered by the priest and Joseph K., characteristic
of a rabbinic discussion of the Bible or the Talmud.
The story contains a cluster of allusions to Judaism:

1. The Law suggests the Torah, while the light emanating from it which the man
perceives only when on the point of death, may have a source in the Kabbalah:
God conceals the primal light from the eyes of sinful mankind and will reveal it
only when the diverse worlds, into which the creation has disintegrated, are again
reunited.
2. The man from the country evokes the theme of the am ha-arets, a term originally
applied to the rural people of Palestine who did not understand the intricacies of the
Torah as systematized by the rabbis. Kafka also knew the Yiddish word amorets,
which had come to mean ignoramus and which he uses in his diary.
3. The description of the doorkeeper evokes an eastern orthodox Jew (fur coat, big
sharp nose and long beard, fleas in the fur collar). This evokes descriptions of
the Hasidic Rebbes (rabbis) or tsaddikim (righteous ones), who were credited with
miraculous powers and held court to a great number of petitioners. They employed
doorkeepers who asked each petitioner their name and occupation, then took their
money and admitted them to the Rebbes presence. They and the tsaddik expected
to be paid and the visitor had to deal with several of these intermediaries who were
often notorious for their corruption.
4. It is as though religious mysteries are guarded by someone who is humanly limited
and indeed venal (Robertson, 1985, p.127).
Some questions (raised by the Chaplain and Joseph K.):
1. Does the doorkeeper have the authority to do what he does? What if he exceeds the
limits of his authority? Is he telling the truth?
2. Is the man from the country right to accept his authority? What if he is an
ignoramus? Should the story be read as a story about a stupid man, and what
difference would that make? Is he Everyman? Is he a free man, representing
everyone, while the doorkeeper is not? Who should have priority? Who does?
3. Everyone strives to reach the Law: in what sense? Is access to the Law a right?
Is access permanently frustrated?
Some interpretations of Before the Law
Interpretation 1. Idel, 1988, pp.27071: Before the Law relates to a story about the
Baal Shem Tov, the great Hasidic rabbi:
When the Baal Shem had a difficult task before him, he would go to a certain place in the
woods, light a fire and meditate in prayer, and what he had set out to achieve was done.
When a generation later the Maggid of Meseritz was faced with the same task, he would
go to the same place in the woods and say: We can no longer light the fire but we can still
speak the prayers, and what he wanted done happened. Again, a generation later Rabbi
Moshe Leib of Sasov had to perform this task. And he too went into the woods and said:
32
We can no longer light a fire, nor do we know the secret meditations belonging to the
prayer but we do know the place in the woods to which it all belongs, and that must be
sufficient; and sufficient it was. But when another generation had passed and Rabbi Israel
of Rishin was called upon to perform the task, he sat down on his golden chair in his
castle and said: We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayers, we do not know the
place, but we can tell the story of how it was done. And the story-teller adds, The story
which he told had the same effect as the actions of the other three.
This story describes the transition from religious practice to a memory of religious
practice, our present condition, and optimistically says that we can still achieve what
earlier generations achieved. But there has been a loss of memory and a decline of
practice. Idel regards Before the Law as an instructive example of the last remnants of
Jewish mysticism. We are now in a post-religious situation, able not to practise religion
but only to tell stories about religious practice in a nostalgic way.
The man from the country is still aware of the mystical facet of the LawBut his
passivity prevents him from daring to attempt to do what Jewish mystics had done in earlier
generations: overcome their fears, as Moses overcame the dreadful angels, in order to enter
another dimension. Kafkas Law is intended for everyone who dares, but the loss of selfconfidence, faith and energy leaves man with only the capacity to tell mystical stories about
an impersonal, fascinating world that, according to Kafka, is beyond his reach.
(p.271)
The man from the country is the modern Everyman who lacks the spiritual strength to
do what earlier generations did, namely struggle to have access to God and the Law; by
the way he accepts the prohibition, this man fails in his primary task and should instead
defy the gatekeeper and enter!
Kafkas parable presents a situation that is totally antithetical to the basic conception of
Torah study, mystical and otherwise. The Torah was given in order to be investigated,
and it is mans obligation to confront this challenge. Moses, in many of the midrashic
renditions of the biblical story, ascended to heaven in order to receive the Torah, although
he knew he would encounter great peril. In Kafkas story, however, the watchmen are
there to pacify and effectively subdue the defendant.
(Idel, Mysticism in Cohen, A. and P. Mendes-Flohr (eds)
Contemporary Jewish Thought. (New York, 1972), p.655; emphasis added)
Does the parable then represent the modern human being who feels both bound by
the Law and at the same time does not have the strength to reach it? There is an abyss
between God and man (the way to the Law is barred), and we have to wait in hope
that access will be given, but it is not given: is that our tragedy? Contrast the theme of
passivity which Idel identifies as a feature of the story with the active engagement with
regard to the law which Levinas puts forward (see Chapter 4 of the subject guide on
Levinas).
Interpretation 2. Buber 1965, p.140 and the following (see also Horowitz 1995,
pp.2133): Buber says that when Kafka visited his home near Berlin in 1911 or 1912,
just before writing The Trial, they discussed the problem of evil in the Bible and that
Kafka asked him about Psalm 82, in which God pronounces judgement on the divine
beings (angels) who judge perversely and abuse their authority over men. Buber thinks
that this psalm, interpreted as referring to the evil angels who abuse their office, lies
behind Kafkas thinking at this time.
Buber quotes from Kafkas diaries: I find, therefore, my opinion, or at least the opinion
with Psalm 82 where the sons of God or angels, to whom He had entrusted the
regiment over the human world and who had vilely misused their office and judged
falsely. Kafkas diary in 1915 contains the following: Opened the Bible. The
33
unjust Judges. Confirmed in my opinion, or at least in an opinion that I have already

encountered in myself. But otherwise there is no significance to this, I am never visibly
guided in such things, the pages of the Bible dont flutter in my presence (Diaries
19101923 (Vintage, 1999), p.342). Buber takes Psalm 82 to be an oriental myth,
elaborated by the Gnostics, of the astral spirits who fatefully determine the destiny of
the world, but from whose power that man may become free who dedicates himself
to the concealed highest light and enters into rebirth (p.145). Buber thinks that The
Trial presents a world in which Gods power has been delegated to lesser gods, namely
mediators who abuse their power, disobeying God and deciding according to their own
interests. At the end of the psalm, God decides to cast them down and to be himself
the sole just ruler on earth. This final aspect of divine judgement on the unjust angels
is absent in Kafkas fictional world, and so he portrays a world subject to malevolent
forces that work against our good. Buber wrote:
Kafka describes the human world as one which is given over the intermediary beings,
with which they play their confused game. From the unknown One who gave this world
into their impure game, no message of comfort or promise penetrates to us. He is, but He
is not present. What has not entered into the view of Kafka, of the man of our time, is to
be found in this Psalm.
(Buber, Interpretation of Psalm 82 Judgement of Judges,
in Good and Evil (New York, 1953), p.20)
Interpretation 3. Robertson, 1985, p.121 and the following: Robertson gives a helpful
introduction to the parable and its place within The Trial.
Interpretation 4. Feuerlicht, 1966: is excellent on the setting of this parable within The
Trial. There is nothing complicated here that needs explaining.
Interpretation 5. Grzinger, 1994, pp.5154: Grzingers general approach is outlined
above. He interprets this story as a variation on the Kabbalistic theme of a journey
through the gates to the halls of the Torah: a metaphor for the goal towards which
human existence aspires. Mans journey is a path to the Torahlife in its deepest
sense. Man takes only the initial steps, but these steps are under the influence of that
higher realm; man seeks to create advocates for himself and to exercise some influence
of his own on this higher world; both represent the path from the multiplicity of the
world to the unity of the Godheadit is a journey of leave-taking and of testing it is
a judgment (p.51). De Vidas describes a series of interrelated and mutually dependent
holy and profane halls and forces. The profane halls can take on an almost hostile
attitude towards Godalthough even this impure side stands in the service of divine
judgment (p.52). (Ask yourself what the profane halls might be.)
Following Grzinger, here are some pointers:
The image of the man seeking entrance to the Law represents humanity and what we
are asked to do: to strive to enter the courts of holiness.
The gatekeeper is strangely one of the ways in which the heavenly world deals with
us, perhaps by making our movement towards God difficult. That there are obstacles
in the way of the mans entry is to be expected because our situation is subject to
testing and the judgement against us might be negative. Human life before God is
conceivable only as a life in judgment (p.52). Grzinger points out that the Jewish
tradition also invokes the concept of divine mercy in relation to us; Kafka, it seems,
does not. Is Kafka then using only one aspect of this Jewish tradition for dramatic
purposes?
34
God respects the freedom of human beings and if humans can rise through the courts
and halls towards God, they acquire a status greater than the angels who do Gods
will. So in the parable, it is the man who is greater than the [angelic] gatekeeper.
Perfect man now stands higher than the powerful officers of the hierarchical court.
[But can this be said of the man in the parable who is deflected from his striving
towards Torah? Idel is surely right to point out that this man (Everyman?) fails.]
Grzinger points to the paradox in the Kabbalistic ideas which Kafka uses:
Human beings are subordinate to the celestial court and are impotent before it. However,
because of his free will, man is actually superior to it and most importantly so when he
exercises this free will in deciding in favour of the Torah and of godliness. This is the
basic contradiction inherent in the view the neoplatonic Kabbalah holds of the existence
of the world as a whole.
(p.54)
A final comment: in the discussion of the story in The Trial, the priest says to
Joseph K.: It is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as
necessary. Joseph K. replies: A melancholy conclusion. It turns lying into a universal
principle. This harsh judgement, which if true rules out the possibility of discovering
the truth of human life, is said by Joseph K. with finality, but it was not his final
judgment. It is as though the reader is being led to accept that what is the case (our
inability to access the Law and godliness) might not be the same as what is good for us.
(This may echo Weil.) The fate of Joseph K. in The Trial is a brutal death, like a dog.
Notice Pascals Pense 165: The last act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play.
They throw earth over your head and it is finished for ever. (We know that Pascal was
one of the Christian writers whom Kafka read with care.)
Activity
Compare the different interpretations of Before the Law.
Is Kafka a religious writer in whom judgement has replaced mercy?
The City Coat of Arms

Activity
Read the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11.19. There are some puzzles
here:
1. Why does God object to the building of the tower?
2. Why does he introduce plurality of languages? Is it a punishment or an act of mercy to
prevent us doing damage to ourselves? Note that earlier in Genesis Cain is protected
from violence by God, probably so that history should not be marked by retribution
(Gen 4.15).
3. Notice the distinction between the tower and the city: Kafka will pick this up and
exploit it in his story which is a re-working of the Genesis story. Read Kafkas story
now. Surely this is a parable about history. The tower might represent a project which
unifies human activity and effort and gives it purpose. It is indefinitely postponed
because the first generation judges that nothing should be done because the next
generation will do it better. But the city is there, but why? The only purpose of the city
is to enable the tower to be built, and if this is deferred, why does the city exist?
35
The suggestion, surely, is that our shared human life lacks the only purpose that could
justify it, metaphorically the building of the tower. In which case, this is a bitter
comment on the meaninglessness of our history. Notice too the final lines in which all
the art produced in our pointless city is filled with longing for a prophesied day when
the city would be destroyed by five successive blows from a gigantic fist. The culture
is filled with a death-wish, and looks for its own obliteration. Notice also two little
fragments from Kafka on the Babel theme:
If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without ascending it, the work would
have been permitted.
What are you building? I want to dig a subterranean passage. Some progress must be
made. My station up there is much too high. We are digging the pit of Babel.
Activity
Compare Kafkas view of history here with Pascals Pense 64: Mine, thine. This is
my dog, said these poor children. That is my place in the sun. There is the origin
and image of universal usurpation.
Some more stories
Read An Imperial Message as a possible parable about revelation. (Note that several
of Kafkas stories are about China and the building of the Great Wall.)
Read The Hunger Artist (Robertson, 2004, p.64 and the following; Satz and Ozsvath,
1978). Notice his Zrau Aphorisms: There is no having, only a being, only a state
of being that craves the last breath, craves suffocation. The Martyrs do not reject
the body; they elevate it on the cross. In this they agree with their opponents.
Read Robertson (1983) which will introduce you to some of the religious and
philosophical aspects of the Zrau Aphorisms, the dense and difficult sayings in
which Kafka tries to formulate important points for himself and others.
Read Metamorphosis, one of his most remarkable stories in which Gregor Samsa
wakens up one day to find that he has been transformed into a beetle or a cockroach.
His inner identity continues notice his appreciation of music. Is the beetle a
symbol of how he is made to feel by the other members of the family? Much of the
first part of the story deals with the unhappy conditions of his professional work.
But is he appreciated by the family? The promise of family respects and honour
he so desires in return for sacrificing his happiness will come to him only after he
becomes a real sacrifice after his death. As the sister says, Then we wouldnt have
a brother, but wed be able to go on living and honouring his memory. (Gross,
2002, p.90) Does Gregor sense that he is unwanted and that it would be better if he
were dead? Family dynamics are explored here. The title means transformation;
there is an important transformation at the end of the story when all the members of
the family feel much happier after his death.
Summary
Kafka uses stories to address important and difficult aspects of human life. Our lives are
lived out under certain family and social pressures and so the self is never at ease either
with itself or its immediate world. In many ways he is writing parables. His startingpoint is surely that what we need to know is not given to us to know: it is hidden from
us, for a reason we do not know. He does not write fiction from an explicitly religious
perspective, but in his stories there are echoes and traces of Jewish (and Christian)
themes. There are traces of meaning available to us but no over-arching framework in
which we might situate ourselves: that seems to be the tone of his fictional world in
which characteristically Jewish themes are presented in a way that is accessible to the
36
secular world in which we now live. Central to his work is the exploration of elusive
aspects of identity and meaning and the dilemmas of the self caught in a world whose
functioning and purpose are concealed from us. The task is to find a way of living in
such a world. This may be the starting point, but the intensity of our human search for
meaning, a way beyond judgement, perhaps indicates that this may not be the last
word.
Learning outcomes
should be able to:
discuss how Kafka uses stories to raise important points about life
discuss whether he should be regarded as a fundamentally religious writer
offer informed interpretations of three of his stories
discuss in particular, issues relating to the interpretation of Before the Law
give an account of Grzingers view of Kafkas dependence on Kabbalistic themes.

1. While instability and brutality are characteristic features of the fictional world
described by Kafka, they are not too far from present day reality. Discuss.
2. How should Before the Law be interpreted?
3. Kafka gives us a fictional world in which there is judgement without mercy. Discuss.
4. Is Kafka a religious writer?
37
Notes
38
Chapter 3: Simone Weil (190943)
Chapter 3
Simone Weil (190943)

Essential reading
Primary texts
Weil, S. Gravity and Grace. (Routledge, 2004) [ISBN 9780415290012].

Weil, S. Waiting For God. (Perennial Classics, 2001) [ISBN 0060959703].
Weil, S. Forms of the Implicit Love of God, Waiting on God. (Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1951) [no ISBN for 1951 edition], pp.81142 (VLE). 1995 edition available (Fount)
[ISBN 000627885X (pbk)].
Weil, S. The Love of God and Affliction, in On Science, Necessity and the Love of God.
(Oxford University Press, 1968), pp.17098 (VLE).
Secondary texts
Astell, A. Saintly Mimesis: Contagion and Empathy in the Thought of Ren Girard, Edith
Stein and Simone Weil, Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 22
(2004), pp.11631, esp. p.127 and the following.
Dupr, L. Simone Weil and Platonism: an Introductory Reading in Doering, E.J. and E.O.
Springsted (eds) The Christian Platonism of Simone Weil. (University of Notre Dame
Press, 2004), [ISBN 0268025649 (hbk); 0268025657 (pbk)], pp.922 (VLE).
Estelrich, B. Simone Weils Concept of Grace, Modern Theology 25 (2009), pp.23951.
McDade, J. Simone Weil and Gerard Manley Hopkins on God, Affliction, Necessity and
Sacrifice, Forum Philosophicum (Krakow) 13 (2008), pp.116 (Online Library;
Academic Search Complete).
McDade, J. Notes on The Great Beast (VLE).
McLellan, D. Thought, in Simone Weil: Utopian Pessimist (Macmillan, 1989) [ISBN
0333487079], pp.191219 (VLE) (a fine biography by a political philosopher).
Pirruccelo, A. Gravity in the Thought of Simone Weil, Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research 57 (1997), pp.7393.
Plant, S. Simone Weil. (Fount Christian Thinkers, 1996; expanded edition: London: SPCK,
2007) [ISBN 9780281059386 (pbk)].
Plato, The Republic, VII, pp.51420 (Myth of the Cave).
Sturma, L. Flannery OConnor, Simone Weil and the Virtue of Necessity, Studies in the
Literary Imagination 20 (1987), pp.10921.
Willox, A.C. The Cross, the Flesh and the Absent God: Finding Justice through Love and
Affliction in Simone Weils Writings, Journal of Religion 88 (2008), pp.5374 (Online
Library; Academic Search Complete).
Wood, R.C. God may strike you thisaway: Flannery OConnor and Simone Weil on
Affliction and Joy, Renascence 59 (2007), pp.18195.
Additional reading
Primary texts
Weil, S. Gateway to God. (Fontana, 1974) [ISBN 0006233805].

Weil, S. An Anthology. (Penguin, 2005) [ISBN 0141188197; 9780141188195].
Weil, S. Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks. (Routledge, 1998)
[ISBN 0415186625].
39
Secondary texts
Allen, D. and E.O. Springsted Divine Necessity: Weilian and Platonic Conceptions in
Spirit, Nature, and Community: Issues in the Thought of Simone Weil. (State University
of New York Press, 1994) [ISBN 0791420175; 0791420183], pp.3352.
Bok, S. Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil: the Possibility of Dialogue, Gender Issues 22
(2005), pp.7178.
Dietz, M. Between the Human and the Divine: The Political Thought of Simone Weil.
(Rowman and Littlefield, 1988) [ISBN 0847675750 (pbk); 0847675742 (hbk)], esp.
p.105 and following.
Little, J.P. Simone Weils Concept of Decreation in Bell, R.H. (ed.) Simone Weils
Philosophy of Culture: Readings Toward a Divine Humanity. (Cambridge University
Press, 1993), pp.2551.
Patterson, P. and L.E. Schmidt The Christian Materialism of Simone Weil, in Doering and
Springsted, The Christian Platonism of Simone Weil. (University of Notre Dame Press,
2004) [ISBN 0268025657], pp.7980.
Perrin, J.M. and G. Thibon Simone Weil as we knew her. (Routledge, 2003) [ISBN
0415306434 (pbk); 0415306426].
Ptrement, S. Simone Weil: A Life. (Mowbrays, 1977) [ISBN 0264662393] (a full
biography).
Springsted, E.O. The Religious Basis of Culture: T.S. Eliot and Simone Weil, Religious
Studies 25 (1989), pp.10516.
Steiner, G. Sainte Simone Simone Weil in No Passion Spent: Essays 19781996. (Faber
and Faber, 1996) [ISBN 0571176976], pp.17179.
Von der Ruhr, M. Simone Weil: An Apprenticeship in Attention. (Continuum, 2005) [ISBN
08264746241 (pbk); 0826458238 (hbk)] (a valuable introduction to her life and
thought).
Introduction
Simone Weil was one of the most original religious thinkers of the early twentieth
century. She died in 1943 aged 34 in Ashford in Kent of medical complications related
to an eating disorder; she was then working for General de Gaulles Free French forces
who were preparing to return to France after the defeat of the Nazis. Her earlier life
was marked by an ascetical temperament, religious unbelief and radical commitment
to left-wing politics: after her philosophy studies in Paris, she worked in a factory:
As I worked in the factory, indistinguishable to all eyes, including my own, from the
anonymous mass, the affliction of others entered into my flesh and my soul. (As we
will see the theme of affliction became an important part of her thought.) She assisted
the anti-Franco forces during the Spanish Civil War but an accident in a kitchen made
her withdraw from this political struggle. It was in the years after this that she began to
have strong religious experiences which turned her into a Christian believer. Suffering
and what she calls affliction came to have a deep religious significance for her, but it
also has a deep human source:
The suffering all over the world obsesses me and overwhelms me to the point of
annihilating my faculties and the only way I can revive them and release myself from the
obsession is by getting a large share of danger and hardship.
(Seventy Letters, p.156)
Although deeply attracted to Catholicism, she refused baptism because she did not feel
able to identify with large movements or social groups. In these days when so large a
proportion of humanity is sunk in materialism, [I wonder] if God does not want there
to be some men and women who have given themselves to him and to Christ and who
40
yet remain outside the Church. Her conscious adoption of the position of the Christian
outsider who yet feels that she is deeply involved in the mystery of God contributes
to the sense of intense solitude that seems to mark her writings. (This may be why
she appeals to people who dislike institutional Christianity.) Most of her work takes
the form of essays, notebooks and aphorisms that seem to be modelled on the style of
Pascals Penses. Her religious writings, always fused with philosophical concerns, and
deeply shaped by Plato, date from this time. So, as you read her, remember that these
writings come from a short, six-year period. (Again, a parallel with Pascal.)
She had temperamental difficulties in belonging to a group such as the Church; she
disliked Judaism for these and other reasons (an exclusively collective religion
(Gravity, p.161)), and she came to have a distaste for large-scale political movements
such as Socialism, at times condemning society as a whole: The social order is
irreducibly that of the prince of this world (Gravity, p.166).
Beware of making her into a more systematic thinker than she was. Remember too
that she was not a professional academic: she was exploratory and tentative in her
intellectual work. Two remarks from her cast light on how her mind worked: the first
shows that instead of setting contradictory statements in opposition to one another, it
may be better to retain them vertically as points that need to be retained and not cast
aside: We have not to choose between opinions. We have to welcome them all but
arrange them vertically, placing them on suitable levels (Gravity, p.131). The second is:
Method of investigation: as soon as we have thought something, try to see in what way
the contrary is true (Gravity, p.92). Good advice too for those who study her.
The Great Beast and the Cave

Reading
Gravity and Grace, pp.16469; Estelrich (2009); McDade, Notes on The Great Beast;
Dupr (2004); Plant (1996/2007), p.83 and the following.
This section will give you an entry into Weils central ideas and how she reads Plato as a
way of understanding the human condition. Begin by reading the text of Platos parable
of the Great Beast (Republic VI, p.493) in McDades Notes. Here Plato argues that
false philosophers simply give back to the people the unexamined and misleading views
which people already have and call this wisdom. This is like a keeper looking after a
great beast: he thinks he is controlling the beast but in fact the beast, with its appetites
and unruly nature, is controlling the keeper. Weil interprets: To adore the Great Beast
is to think and act in conformity with the prejudices and reactions of the multitude to the
detriment of all personal search for truth and goodness (Gravity, p.164: editors note).
Plato thought that society determines the behaviour of the individuals, with the
damaging consequence that individuals become accustomed to it and conform to it.
Hence they come to believe that what they are doing is the best and the only thing
that they can do (Estelrich, 2009, p.240). The consequence, for Weil, is that we are
conflicted and internally oppressed by lies and false accounts of our identity and
purpose which we have internalised from the surrounding society. Platos strategy,
shared by Weil, is that true philosophy frees us from enslavement to ignorant ways of
pursuing truth and goodness which are subject to the Great Beast:
The essential idea in Plato which is also that of Christianity is that man cannot
escape being wholly enslaved to the beast, even down to the innermost recesses of his
soul, except insofar as he is freed by the supernatural operation of grace.
(Oppression and Liberty, p.165)
41
Activity
How does this differ from the Christian belief in Original Sin? Read Pascals Penses
131 and 695.
Is it true that we are shaped (determined?) by our society as completely as Platos myth
suggests?
Try to find examples of how social pressure leads people to think and feel in ways that
are incompatible with seeking the good.
What are the mechanisms by which human beings internalise the messages of the
Great Beast?
It is a task to see the world as it is. (Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, in
Exisentialists and Mystics (Chatto and Windus, 1997), p.375.) Why is it so difficult?
Now read Platos Myth of the Cave (Republic VII, pp.51420), available and widely
discussed on the web. One way of interpreting this might be: humans are unable to have
direct connection with the good and the real because we are locked into a condition in
which the good and the real are mediated to us through imperfect versions or images.
We deal with created versions (transcriptions) of the real, but the ideals of truth, beauty
and God are not to be thought of as objects in the world (Plant, 1996/2007, pp.8386).
What are the chains that keep us in the cave? Our impoverished imaginations, Plant
suggests. Weil is clear:
There is a reality outside the world, that is to say, outside space and time, outside mans
mental universe, outside any sphere whatsoever accessible to human facultiesand just
as the reality of this world is the sole foundation of facts, so that other reality is the sole
foundation of the good.
(Quoted in Plant, p.86)
Her remark, Society is the cave. The way out is solitude shows Weils negative view
of society which locks us into ways of living that resist and inhibit access to the good
(Gravity, p.165). Remember that Weil is a Christian Platonist who understands the
good as God. The question then is how to have access to God when we are locked
into a pattern that, variously, she calls necessity or gravity. The task of life is to
understand: where we are (in the cave; subject to the Great Beast); how to think with a
clear mind about our condition (subject to an impersonal order governed by necessity
and arbitrary human freedom that brings us affliction); and what to do about it.
Whats the problem?

Reading
Gravity, pp.1046; Astell (2004), p.127 and the following.
Weil has different answers, and one of them can be clearly stated:
[The Problem:] Each man imagines he is situated at the centre of the world. The illusions
of perspective places him at the centre of space; an illusion of the same kind falsifies his
idea of time; and yet another kindred illusion arranges a whole hierarchy of values around
him
[The Solution:] To give up our imaginary position at the centre, to renounce it, not only
intellectually but in the imaginative part of our soul, that means to awake to what is real
and eternal.
(Forms of the Implicit Love, p.98)
42
One way of reading Weil is to see her as trying to catch a way out of the blinding
circularity of desire, illusion, self-pre-occupation through being decentred or decreated
through a purifying relation to a difficult but graceful God. As we will see, she develops
this in her notion of decreation. Another, more philosophical, answer drawn from
Plato is that the world in which we live is a fusion of the good and the necessary. The
world cannot be simply and perfectly good in the way the form of the good is perfect
because physical reality requires compromises. Necessity is the constraint imposed on
things simply because they are physical and particular; so reality is either imperfect when
compared with the form or ideal of the Good or it is simply neutral.
Platos example is that of the skull protecting the brain: if it is too light, it will offer
insufficient protection; if it is too heavy, our mobility will be impaired. So the way we
are is a compromise of relevant factors: what has to be there (the necessary) is pressed
towards a good end, but this good end always has to accommodate the compromises
needed to produce this kind of world (Timaeus, 74e75c).
In religious terms: although the world is good (Gen 1.4ff), as an expression of divine
goodness, the order of the world is a less than perfect expression of divine goodness.
Because it is material, contingent, diverse, subject to processes of birth and decay, it is
a fusion of positive and negative features. And so our human lives are embedded in a
world order, which, while being the product of divine goodness, has features that are not
entirely directed towards, or expressive of, the good, especially as they impact on us
directly. How, for example, can cancerous cells in my body be good? Putting it very
loosely: the world does not owe us a living, and in the end the divinely willed order of
the world brings death to all living things because as animals we are subject to mortality
and have to face the inevitability of death. Weil sees human beings as caught in these
paradoxes.
And not only in the physical order: the mixture of the good and the necessary is
in the social order too. The way the social order is (a necessary compromise of good
factors and factors which resist the good) leads people to think that this is all that is
available to them and so we are not easily drawn towards the good. As Estelrich puts
it: society has the ability not only to distort but also to mix up the two poles from which
reality is made: good and necessity, and this eliminates any possibility for human
beings to start moving towards the good (Estelrich, 2009, p.241). (Bear in mind the
myth of the Great Beast that determines how people think of their lives.) Society has to
be regarded as the main obstacle that impedes human beings from becoming who they
really are, and also the barrier that prevents them from having an accurate understanding
of reality (Estelrich, 2009, p.241). Hence, he says, Weil thinks that human beings reach
the maximum degree of existential confusion.
The task(s) of life
Estelrich (2009) summarises what Weil regards as the task of life:

According to Weil, the process of overcoming confusion, discovering contradiction, and
being able to differentiate good from necessity, is absolutely crucial for human beings
because after going through that process they can fully perceive that:
1. the only place where human existence can take place is in an in-between realm
dominated by the constant tension of necessity and good;
2. the fundamental characteristic of human nature is no other than a life under the sign of
contradiction; and
3. the very essence of humankind is nothing else than a continuous and perpetual
straining after an unknown good.
(pp.24142)
43
This in-between realm, and the experience of contradiction that it brings, is common
to all. It is characterised by what Weil calls this gravity, the weight or resistance
built into us that impairs our flourishing and thus makes it difficult for human beings
to live in ways dedicated to selflessness and the good. A resistance to the good, or at
least a neutrality towards it, is built into the way the world is and the way we are. One
symptom is that when one human being shows that he needs anotherthe latter draws
back from him (Gravity, p.1). Our nature, as experience shows, is subject to patterns
of response which are opaque and unstable; we are not consistent in pursuing the good.
Where a certain strand of Western Christianity will see this as a consequence of original
sin, Weil prefers to think in terms of a tension between gravity, or constraints imposed
by an impersonal necessity built into the way we are and the way the world is, and the
supernatural movement of grace that lifts us towards God.
We are subject to various factors (physical, psychological, social) which weigh
heavily on us. So the problem of human life is that, on the one hand, we are subject
to an impersonal order or necessity that does take us towards the Good and that
seems to lock us into an impersonal and sometimes de-humanising order of nature.
Weil speaks of the pitiless necessity of matter (quoted in McLellan, p.197). All the
natural movements of the soul, Weil says, are controlled by laws analogous to those of
physical gravity (French: pesanteur) (Gravity, p.1; compare Plant,1996/2007, p.43).
And yet, on the other hand, we strain after a fulfilment found in an unknown goodness
that we call God. Weil summarises:
The essential contradiction in human life is that man, with a straining after the good
constituting his very being, is at the same time subject in his entire being, both in mind
and in flesh, to a blind force, to a necessity completely indifferent to the good. So it is; and
that is why no human thinking can escape from contradiction
It is, above all, the fundamental contradiction, that between the good and necessity, or its
equivalent, that between justice and force, whose use constitutes a criterion. As Plato said,
an infinite distance separates the good from necessity. They have nothing in common.
They are totally other.
(Oppression and Liberty, pp.17374)
As a conclusion, and in order to extend the discussion into the social and personal
realm, note the following comment on how Weil views necessity:
Like Plato, Weil uses the term necessity to denote the pole that consists of all that appears
to eclipse the perfection of God. Necessity is most basically the ordered character of the
material world, described by scientific laws. It is also the determinative dynamic of human
corporate social life. Society, politics, the media, the judiciary, the church, but also all of
the more informal communities we inhabit, all are comprehensively ordered by necessity.
In this realm, the realm of the great beast, necessity expresses itself as the collective
mind and will of society driven by the quest for prestige in the face of public opinion,
and mistaking the order of necessity for the order of the goodBut necessity also reigns
supreme in the psychological and moral realmWeil and Plato are sure that where human
beings think their freedom is greater, they are in fact deceived. Psychology has shown
us that, subconsciously, unconsciously, we are driven by monsters within usAnd
Weil claims that this psychological necessity is complicated by a moral necessity, our
consistent tendency to repressionThe effect of our self-deceptive repression is that we
become the victim of the monsters within. They determine our actions. This mechanical
necessity holds all men in its grip at every moment (Waiting for God, p.42). Might, raw
force, injustice, ugliness are some of the names Weil gives to this sovereign dynamic at
work in the order of necessity.
(Patterson, P. and L.E. Schmidt, The Christian Materialism of Simone Weil,
in Doering and Springsted, 2004, pp.7980)
44
Activity
Write a close analysis of the above passage. Do you detect echoes of Kafka here?
Clarify what Weil means by gravity and how it impacts on us.
What does Weil mean by necessity?
Necessity, obedience and affliction

Reading
Gravity, pp.4350; Plant (1996/2007), p.47 and the following; McDade (2008); Pirruccelo
(1997); Wood (2007); Sturma (1987).
One of the intriguing features of Weils thought is the way in which she circles round
the difficult problem of how the impersonal order of the world relates to God. She
will not allow herself to think two things: the first idea that she rejects is that God
directs everything that happens and so God can, in this perspective, be said to will the
individual events that take place. This brings, she thinks, God too close and makes the
events of the world the direct object of Gods intention. God, then, can be blamed for
directly causing an illness, an accident, a chance event that damages a person: is this
compatible with holding that God, as supreme goodness, never acts against the perfect
good which God is?
The second view that she rejects is that God has no connection at all with the way the
world functions: how then can God be said to be creator and sustainer of the world?
Two important quotations show how she tries to mediate between God being too
remote or too close. The first presents God as deliberately restraining his divine
power to allow scope for other agents to operate:
God causes this universe to exist, but he consents not to command it, although he has the
power to do so. Instead he leaves two other forces to rule in his place. On the one hand
there is the blind necessity attaching to matter, including the psychic matter of the soul,
and on the other the autonomy essential to thinking persons.
(Waiting on God, p.97)
Her view here is that the world is governed by the impersonal order of nature and
the free decisions of human beings (to do evil, for example), and that this is a form
of abdication on the part of God, a withdrawal, a voluntary self-restriction on Gods
part. Thibon, who knew her, gives an accurate summary of points which are scattered
throughout Weils writings:
Creation reflects God by its beauty and harmony, but, through the evil and death which
abide in it and the blind necessity by which it is governed, it also reflects the absence of
God. We have issued from God: that means that we bear his imprint and it means also
that we are separated from him. God who is Being has in a sense effaced himself so
that we can exist. He has given up being everything in order that we might exist; he has
dispossessed himself in our favour of his own necessity, which is identical with goodness,
to allow another necessity to reign which is alien and indifferent to good.
(G. Thibon, Introduction in Gravity, p.xxi)
Pascal seems to have anticipated Weils treatment of necessity when he wrote: If

God gave us masters with his own hand, how gladly we ought to obey them. Necessity
and events are infallibly such (Pense 919). As we will see below, Weil links the
impersonal order of the world to Gods kenosis (self-emptying).
45
Activity
Write a commentary on the following extract from Weils Notebooks and consider if it
is a satisfactory account of the issues:
God does not send suffering and woes as ordeals; he lets Necessity distribute them in
accordance with its own proper mechanism. Otherwise he would not be withdrawn
from creation, as he has to be in order that we may be and can thus consent not to be
any longer. The occasional contacts resulting from inspiration between his creatures
and Him are less miraculous than is his everlasting absence, and constitute a less
marvellous proof of his love.
Gods absence is the most marvellous testimony of perfect love, and that is why pure
necessity, the necessity which is manifestly so different from good, is so beautiful.
The abandonment, at the culminating point of the Crucifixion what unfathomable
love this shows on either side.
It is necessary we should know the absence of God, except in those rare moments of
the partial destruction of the I. To imagine that God can be close at hand without
such proximity destroying the I is to show a complete ignorance of who He is.
Everything which makes this absence manifest is beautiful.
(Notebooks II, p.402)
Decreation and necessity

Reading
Gravity and Grace, p.32 and the following; Plant (1996/2007), pp.3842; Little (1993),
pp.2552; Allen and Springsted (1994), pp.3352; Dupr (2004); McDade (2008).
Decreation is one of Weils key ideas which she elaborates in various ways. It has
elements of spiritual asceticism the importance of detachment and unselfishness is
part of many religious traditions. At a simple level, it means that we must become
decentred, attentive to what is the case and to the needs of others, generous and selfemptying to a high degree: these are familiar ideas.
The obverse of kenosis or decreation is when humans invest all their energy in false,
self-directed ways of living. In McDade (2008), you will see a passage by Weil in which
she suggests that great criminals are obedient because they so block their freedom that
they acquire the unthinking, non-responsive obedience of blind matter. Problematic, of
course, but it is a highly original suggestion.
For Weil, decreation is grounded in a particular view of creation. Gods creation of
the world is not an act of expansion or limitless power; it is an act of abdication. What
comes into existence is governed by certain rules which work impersonally (the law
of gravity is the most obvious example) and by the exercise of freedom on the part of
human beings. God wills not to be everything, and, metaphorically, makes space for
other things to be. (There is an echo here of the views of the Jewish Kabbalist, Isaac
Luria.) This is the template for what humans, in Gods image, need to do. If creation
is a renunciation of Gods power, a self-imposed limitation which God accepts, then
decreation is how humans imitate this divine self-emptying. This requires an uprooting
of ones very selfhood, a total submission to the suffering caused by a world abandoned
by God (Dupr, p.15). Just as our self is subject to impersonal rules by which the world
operates, analogously so God does not direct the ordering of the world, but becomes
subject to it in the incarnation of his Son, Jesus. How we pass from self-directed life
into the uncreated without illusions or self-generated fantasy about the self, corresponds
to what God is, the foundational movement of self-relinquishing love.
46
When Weil speaks of the world being abandoned by God, what does she mean?
Surely and simply that God does not control or direct it, and indeed becomes an absent
presence in relation to the world. Dupr explains:
Once expelled from Gods essence, all creatures become subject to an order of necessity
over which God exercises no further direct control. The limits that order imposes on finite
(and potentially conflicting) beings requires the existence of laws that God himself wills
unchangeably, however much pain they inflict on his creatures. As material beings, we are
permanently subject to the unchangeable necessity of physical laws that rule a cosmos of
which we form an integral part.
(Dupr, 2004, p.16)
God abdicates governance of the world, or rather hands it over to two forces: the gravity
that governs matter; and necessity, the objective ordering of the worlds systems. So if
cancer develops in my body, God cannot be said to cause or will this, but only to permit
it as one of the features of the world that is governed by its own laws and operations.
Secondly, God hands the world over to human freedom and allows human beings to act
as they will. They can of course behave badly towards others and because of the choice
God has made to respect this freedom, God is powerless to stop them from, for example,
crucifying his Son.
Revelation and self-emptying
If this is so, and it is a central element in how Weil views the world, we are subject to
the impersonal necessity of a world that, speaking loosely, does not owe us a living,
that in the end will bring us death and the dissolution of the matter that composes our
bodies. The world has its own forces and pressures. And yet we have to recognise that
although our lives are conducted in a system that does not promote our good, this very
system is an expression of divine goodness. God wills to hand us over to an order that is
intended to decreate and decentre us; the most extreme form of this pressure is what Weil
calls affliction. And this is the significance of Christ who becomes afflicted out of love
for others and for God, taking upon himself a subjection to suffering and death, the two
harsh rules that govern matter and express the impersonal necessity built into things.
Necessity always appears to us as an ensemble of laws of variation, determined by fixed
relationships and invariants. Reality for the human mind is contact with necessity.
There is a contradiction here, for necessity is intelligible, not tangible. Thus the feeling of
reality constitutes a harmony and a mystery.
(Intimations, p.178, emphasis added; Allen and Springsted, 1994, p.46)
Weil even goes so far as to judge the truth of a religion by the depth of its grasp of
Gods self-limitation. She thought that Gods revelation was found in many religions
and cultures, not exclusively in Christ. She is critical of religions which envisage God
as a commanding sovereign deity who rules the world in an arbitrary way because she
thinks that this betrays the truth of Gods kenosis (self-emptying) and is potentially
idolatrous:
The religions which have a conception of this renunciation, this voluntary distance, this
voluntary effacement of God, his apparent absence and his secret presence here below,
these religions are true religion, the translation into different languages of the great
Revelation. The religions which represent divinity as commanding wherever it has the
power to do so are false. Even though they are monotheistic they are idolatrous.
(Forms of the Implicit Love of God in Waiting for God, p.88)
To worship a commanding sovereign God, the cosmic tyrant, or conversely to reject

such a God in the spirit of Ivan Karamazov, is to construct a metaphysical idol in place
of the real God.
47
No one goes to God the creator and almighty without passing through God EMPTIED OF
HIS DIVINITY. If one goes to God directly, it is then Jehovah (or Allah, the one in the
Koran). We have to empty God of his divinity in order to love him. He emptied himself
of his divinity by becoming man, then [emptied himself] of his humanity by becoming a
corpse (bread and wine), matter To rebel against God because of mans affliction, after
the manner of Vigny or Ivan Karamazov, is to represent God to oneself as a sovereign.
(Notebooks I, p.283)
(Notice that she is very unjust in her view of God in Judaism and Islam.) To treat God
as a despot running a brutal cosmos is wrong because the whole process of uprooting
of self and subjection to necessity begins with the movement of love and gift that God
is. Weil is concerned about how we are to accept the self-giving reality that is God
by extinguishing the false reality of our imagined lives and our idols: that is the core
meaning of decreation.
The powerful, be they priests, military leaders, kings or capitalists, always believe that
they command by divine right; and those who are under them feel themselves crushed
by a power which seems to them either divine or diabolical, but in any case supernatural.
Every oppressive society is cemented by this religion of power.
(Oppression and Liberty, p.72 and the following)
Activity
Is Weil right that the sign of true revelation is that God is self-emptying?
What is the relation of Gods kenosis and human decreation?
Can a Christian really say that God is absent in the way Weil does?
Is her doctrine of creation Christian or deist?
Forms of the Implicit Love of God

Reading
Weil, Forms of the Implicit Love of God, Waiting on God, pp.81142.
Read this very important, but somewhat rambling, essay by Weil. The opening sections
are important: shes looking for ways of loving God which are indirect or implicit
(ask yourself if there is a difference of meaning between these two words), ways in
which there is contact with God but not a direct contact of love and union. There are,
she says:
only three things here below in which God is really though secretly present. These are
religious ceremonies, the beauty of the world and our neighbour.
(p.81)
She speaks as though these are ways in which God is loved in a veiled form in the
preparatory period, after which they are taken up and completed in a full and explicit
(direct) love of God. But can we also say that for those who are never brought into
direct connection with God, these might be ways in which the reality of God becomes
real to them, signs that convey something of the divine? She says: At the moment
when it touches the soul, each of the forms which such love may take has the virtue of
a sacrament (p.82). So are these not simply preparatory moments or might they also be
sacramental moments of engagement with God, in the mode of a sign which conveys
the reality (the definition of a sacrament).
48
Her important remark, referring to Platos myth of the Cave, Idolatry is a vital necessity
in the cave, suggests that it is inevitable that human beings will engage in a form of
idol-worship because we simply do not have the kind of access to God and the real that
we need. The self, for her, is caught in illusions and is subject to falsifying currents,
but she seems to have thought that while loving God directly is difficult it leads to
affliction and that is what the Cross means and it is probably not required of everyone
except for saints in that extreme form. There are however important, implicit ways in
which people love God: through beauty, through the demanding love of our neighbour
and through religious rituals.
See her fine description of religion: Attention animated by desire is the whole
foundation of religious practices. That is why no system of morality can take their place
(p.128). Pay particular attention to her treatment of beauty, the only finality here below
(p.103). Beauty is an end in itself and in its perfection conveys to us an experience of
the perfected actuality of God, and significantly, it is at the same time an experience
of the senses in touch with the real, the good and the true (for the neo-Platonic and
Thomist tradition, this is what God is). No further comment on this essay is needed,
except to ask you to read it carefully and selectively: it does wander a bit, but there are
good things within it.
Activity
In what sense are religious ceremonies, beauty and love of neighbour implicit ways of
loving God?
Why for Weil is beauty significant?
How are these views compatible with her other views about God being absent from
the creation?
How are these ideas compatible with some of Pascals ideas?
Summary
Weil is an unusual, strangely isolated thinker who wrestles with some of the most
difficult issues; she does so with intensity and originality and with a high degree of
intellectual and spiritual insight. Her chosen status as someone who thinks and worships
God at the margins of the Christian Church gives her a unique quality as a deeply
religious person for whom philosophy and love of God are held together, often in a
deeply felt tension. She is not a systematic thinker, but she does try to think through as
rigorously as she can issues that are central to everyone: goodness, suffering, affliction,
attentiveness, beauty and the strangeness of Gods presence in a world that does not
seem to show signs of him.
Learning outcomes
should be able to:
evaluate the meaning and significance of Weils interpretation of Platos myth of
the Great Beast and the Cave
discuss her interpretation of creation and necessity
discuss how she views decreation
discuss her view of revelation and the self-emptying of God
discuss her view of the three implicit ways of loving God.
49

1. Evaluate the value of Weils interpretation of the Great Beast.
2. Is Weils discussion of necessity compatible with a view of Gods providential care?
3. Is it helpful to think of implicit ways of loving God?
4. What does Weil understand by decreation?
50
Chapter 4: Emmanuel Levinas (190696)
Chapter 4
Emmanuel Levinas (190696)

Essential reading
Primary texts
Levinas, E. A Religion for Adults in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. (Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1992), [ISBN 080185783X], pp.1123 (VLE).
Levinas, E. To Love the Torah More than God, in F.J. van Beeck Loving the Torah More
than God? Towards a Catholic Appreciation of Judaism. (Loyola University Press, 1989)
[ISBN 0829406204], pp.3253 (VLE) (the book gives an insightful response to Levinas
critique of Christianity as well as the fictional text that is the basis of Levinas essay; it is
worth buying if you can get hold of it/afford it).
Levinas, E. On Jewish Philosophy, In the Time of the Nations. (Athlone Press, 1994)
[ISBN 0485114496], pp.16783 (VLE); new 2007 edition (Continuum, 2007)
[ISBN 082649904X].
Levinas, E. Revelation in the Jewish Tradition, Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and
Lectures. (Athlone Press, 1994) [ISBN 0485114305], pp.12950 (VLE).
Levinas, E. Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philipe Nemo. (Duquesne University
Press, 1985) [ISBN 0820701785], pp.10510 (VLE).
Secondary texts
Davis, C. Levinas: An Introduction. (Polity, 1996) [ISBN 0745612636 (pbk); 0745612628],
Chapter 4: Religion, pp.93119 (VLE).
Ellis, F. Levinas, Husserl and Heidegger: a Guide for Students (unpublished, VLE).
Hand, S. (ed.) Prayer without Demand, in A Levinas Reader. (Blackwell, 1989) [ISBN
0631164472 (pbk); 0631164464 (hbk)].
Emmanuel Levinas at Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP, the Stanford Guide):
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/levinas/
McDade, J. Divine Disclosure and Concealment in Bach, Pascal and Levinas, New
Blackfriars 85 (2004), pp.12132.
Morrison, Glen J. Emmanuel Levinas and Christian Theology, Irish Theological Quarterly
68 (2003), pp.324.
Peperzak, A. Judaism and Philosophy in Levinas, International Journal for Philosophy of
Religion 40 (1996), pp.12546.
Putnam, H. Levinas and Judaism, in Critchley, S. and R. Bernasconi (eds) The Cambridge
Companion to Levinas. (Cambridge University Press, 2002) [ISBN 0521665655 (pbk);
0521662060], pp.3362 (VLE).
Putnam, H. Levinas on What is Demanded of Us, in Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to
Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein. (Indiana University Press, 2008) [ISBN
0253351332; 9780253351333], pp.6899.
Westphal, M. Aquinas and Onto-theology American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 80
(2006) pp.17391.
Wilson, G. Levinas and the Primacy of Ethics for Jewish-Christian Relations (unpublished,
VLE).
51
Additional reading
Primary texts
Levinas, E. Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures. (Athlone Press, 1994)
[ISBN as above].
Levinas, E. Nine Talmudic Readings. (Indiana University Press, 1990) [ISBN
9780253208767; 0253208769].
Levinas, E. In the Time of the Nations. (Athlone Press, 1994) [ISBN as above].
Secondary texts
Cohen, R.A. Ethics, Exegesis and Philosophy: Interpretation after Levinas. (Cambridge
University Press, 2001) [ISBN 0521801583].
Cohen, R.A. Emmanuel Levinas: Judaism and the Primacy of the Ethical, in Morgan,
M.L. and P.E. Gordon (eds) The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy.
(Cambridge University Press, 2007) [ISBN 0521012554 (pbk)], pp.23455.
Hand, S. (ed.) A Levinas Reader. (Basil Blackwell, 1989) [ISBN as before].
Kessler, S. Soloveitchik and Levinas: Pathways to the Other, Judaism 51 (2002),
pp.44056.
Kosky, J. Levinas and the Philosophy of Religion. (Indiana University Press, 2001)
[ISBN 0253339251].
Min, A.K. Naming the Unnameable God: Levinas, Derrida, and Marion, International
Journal of Philosophy 60 (2006), pp.99116.
Peperzak, A. To The Other: an Introduction to the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas. (Purdue
University Press, 1993) [ISBN 1557530246 (pbk); 1557530238].
Purcell, M. Levinas and Theology. (Cambridge University Press, 2006) [ISBN 0521012805
(pbk); 9780521012805] (a serious and important study by a Christian theologian).
Purcell, M. Levinas and Doing Theology? The Scope and Limits of Doing Theology with
Levinas, Heythrop Journal 44 (2003), pp.46879.
Webb, S. The Rhetoric of Ethics as Excess: A Christian Theological Response to Emmanuel
Levinas, Modern Theology 15 (1999), pp.116.
Introduction
Emmanuel Levinas is generally regarded as the most important Jewish philosopher of

the twentieth century and there is a developing interest in him by Christian thinkers,
partly as a consequence of the new developing relationship between Christians and
Jews. Levinas himself spoke warmly but critically of Christianity. Born in Lithuania,
he moved to France in 1923 when he was 16 to study philosophy and spent the rest of
his life there. He was influenced by the phenomenology of Husserl and the writings
of Martin Heidegger. (Ellis offers a clear guide to how Levinas philosophy relates to
Husserl and Heidegger and the opening paragraphs of the Stanford Guide are lucid
and relevant here.) Levinas was also deeply committed to Judaism and its traditions,
regularly publishing commentaries on the Talmud. He said, There is a communication
between faith and philosophy and not the notorious conflict (quoted in Cohen, p.235).
Love your neighbour as yourself

Reading
Levinas, A Religion for Adults; Putnam (2002); Morrison (2003).
The central message of Levinas philosophy is Love your neighbour as yourself.

His philosophical writings argue for the centrality of this religious teaching found in
Leviticus 19.18 to the task of being human; through his philosophy this insight which
begins in Judaism becomes universalised and there is an important sense in which
Levinas, is universalising Judaism through his writings (Putnam, 2002 and 2008).
52
The authentically human is the being-Jewish in all men... (Levinas, In the Time of the
Nations, p.164) What Levinas seems to be getting at in this dense statement is that the
way to be an authentic human being comes to expression within the moral teaching
of Judaism. So, a particular religious viewpoint found in the Jewish Torah (Law) is of
significance to non-Jews, not in order to lead them to become Jewish but in order that
they might live out their humanity fully and responsibly.
Levinas writings on Jewish religion and the centrality of ethics for how all human
beings are to live, rather than his more technical philosophy, will be the centre of
our study here. While Levinas philosophical writings can be dense it will do you no
harm to try to grasp some of the features of his philosophy. The Stanford Guide will
be useful here. Remember that Levinas is indirectly addressing questions about the
Holocaust in Nazi Germany. He lost close members of his family in those years, and
his insistence that ethics (and not metaphysics or epistemology) is first philosophy is a
way of arguing that ethics precedes metaphysics, indeed that the ethical is constitutive
of human personhood and therefore is antecedent to, and independent of, theoretical
accounts of reality which can be subject to cultural decline and fashion.
One of the implicit questions which will underpin our study here is whether Levinas can
be said also to treat ethics as first theology: he suggests that the decisive expression
of loving God is ethical responsibility towards others and this is antecedent to
and independent of theoretical accounts of the divine. In his account of the scope of
human responsibility, he proposes that the human person should regard him/herself as
responsible to all and for all, someone who takes on to him/herself a responsibility for
the responsibility (or irresponsibility) of all: as a Christian, one might ask if Levinas,
without meaning to do so, is in fact describing Christ. Is there an implicit Christic
principle in the way he describes the scope of human life? Possibly. We will not try to
Christianise Levinas as a Jew, he saw no reason to attribute a particular significance
to Jesus Christ and one must respect that, but it is difficult to read him without seeing a
religious and ethical aspiration that arises out of Judaism (a responsibility for all) and
what comes to expression in the life of Christ.
In considering A Religion for Adults, we will focus on the relation of ethics and
religion and how he thinks that the true monotheism is a break with idolatry; in the
second essay, To Love the Torah More than God, we will look at what he presents as
the Jewish meaning of suffering, contrasted with a Christian meaning. Other texts will
be introduced in relation to themes raised in these two essays. Bear in mind too that
Levinas is not to be regarded as characteristic of all modern Jewish thinking; he has
been criticised by fellow Jews for putting too much emphasis on ethics and not enough
on other aspects of Jewish identity (Webb, 1999, p.12). Is Levinas simply reducing
what he calls Judaism to his own unique brand of ethical monotheism? asks Putnam
(2008, p.90).
Activity
Become familiar with what Levinas means by saying that ethics is first philosophy.
What difference does it make if personhood is constituted by moral response and not
by self-awareness?
Reflect on what the sources of ethical responsibility are. Emotions? Reasoned
judgement? Why do I feel responsible if someone else is in need?
Why should ethics be the medium by which Judaism is universalized? Does this
treat religion as a vehicle for ethical insight and motivation?
Read Morrison (2003) carefully. Describe Levinas major themes and make notes on
their significance.
53
Infinite responsibility and God

Reading
Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, pp.10522.
We will begin with a remark that Levinas makes in an interview in Ethics and Infinity
(p.105 and the following pages), and then engage in a close reading which will open up
the major themes in his writings:
At no time can one say, I have done my duty. Except the hypocriteIt is in this sense
that there is an opening beyond what is delimited; and such is the manifestation of the
Infinite. It is not a manifestation in the sense of disclosure, which would be adequation
to a given. On the contrary, the characteristic of the relation to the Infinite is that it is not
disclosure. When in the presence of the Other, I say Here I am!, this Here I am! is the
place through which the Infinite enters into language, but without giving itself to be seen.
Since it is not thematized, in any case originally, it does not appear. The invisible God
is not to be understood as God invisible to the senses, but as God non-thematizable in
thought
Some phrases here are difficult but important: for Levinas, we cannot thematize
God as though we had a grasp on God as an object of knowledge. The following is a
paraphrase of what Levinas is saying:
We cannot reach the limit of our responsibility for others. The boundlessness of this
obligation opens up the person to the divine, not in the sense that something is revealed:
this would treat God as an object that I confront or an idea which I think. God is not an
object of thought, but the Other who, through the needs of the other person in need, brings
out from me an authentic obligation to love and help the other person. The true God is
revealed in the moment when I make myself available (Here I am!) to meet the needs of
the other. At this moment, the reality of God comes to expression in human life, evoking
from me an obligation to take responsibility in relation to those afflicted.
In these lines, Levinas is pointing to the unbounded quality of obligation. His use of the
phrase, Here I am! is Scriptural, expressing Abrahams response to God when told to
sacrifice Isaac (Gen 22.1; Putnam, 2002, p.38). Here I am is a performative or speech
act whereby I make myself available ethically and responsibly in practical ways. What
Levinas does next is he moves from this philosophical point about ethical obligation to
religion: he sees our moral boundlessness as a manifestation of the Infinite, not in the
sense that there is a revelation of God in some objective, observable way (something
that he calls dismissively disclosure). For him there is no direct disclosure of God,
such as Christians think takes place through the Incarnation of Gods Word in Christ.
This is perhaps what he points to by the difficult phrase adequation to a given: his
view that God does not become a given means that God does not become an object
that can be known and grasped in thought. But while God cannot be encompassed in
thought, Gods presence becomes real among us when moral obligations to others are
lived out.
This is what Levinas will explore through the image of the face of the other, a
metaphor for what he calls the alterity (otherness) in whose presence I am awakened
to the Infinite, and am called to move towards the Infinite through what I do in relation
to the other person in their need. Levinas speaks of the presence of the face coming
from beyond the world, by which he means the disclosure of the Good that lies beyond
Being (the categories of things that we can know and grasp). A quotation from
Levinas important work, Totality and Infinity, puts it this way:
54
There can be no knowledge of God separated from the relationship with men. The Other
is the very locus of metaphysical truth, and is indispensable for my relation with God. He
does not play the role of a mediator. The other is not the incarnation of God, but precisely
by his face, in which he is disincarnate, is the manifestation of the height in which God is
revealed.
(Quoted in Morrison (2003), p.7)
Responding to the face of the other
The truth of God cannot be thought but it can be lived and it is lived through responding
to the face of the other: surely this is the heart of Levinas teaching here. He seems to
be saying that when I make myself available to the other person in ways which call me
to meet the needs of the other person, I am opening myself up to the absolute Other,
God. In Levinas phrase, in this way the Infinite [God] enters into language, but we
cannot thematise this divine presence through thought.
Ask yourself if Levinas is right to say that moral obligations are limitless. What am
I responsible for? Only for what I do and the consequences which flow from that?
Surely not: a person in need makes a claim on me simply by being in need. If I refuse to
answer that need, I am failing, Levinas will say, to be a person: the other makes a claim
on me, and that is central to who I am and what I am to do. He insists that we should
not understand person in ways which make ethics secondary. If we come up with a
metaphysical approach to personhood (e.g. a person is a rational individual capable of
thought), then we will treat ethics as secondary to personal identity and derived from
metaphysics.
For him, personhood is constituted in the living out of moral obligation. That is what
he means by saying that ethics is first philosophy (passim). He means that moral
obligation is not derived from an abstract account of what a human being is, but when
ethical obligation is experienced and lived out, that is central to the business of being a
human person: through ethics, we give foundational expression to our identity. Levinas
seems to fear that if ethics is dependent on metaphysics, then when metaphysics changes
so do ethics (as they did, for example, during the Holocaust when true personhood
was interpreted racially and others, such as Jews, could be eliminated). (Putnam, 2002,
pp.3435; 2008, p.70 and the following) He is placing ethical responsibility at the core
of human identity.
Let us make a comment on the theological issues at stake here. It is a common theme
that God cannot be thought: medieval Jewish and Christian thinkers said that God is
not in a genus, not in a category of beings alongside other beings that can be known
and named. The attempt to encompass God in what can be known is a form of theology
often called onto-theology. For Heidegger [and for Levinas], onto-theology is the
affirmation and articulation of a highest being who is the key to the meaning of the
whole of being and who can be used to explain everything (Westphal (2006), p.175).
Putting it very loosely, in onto-theology God is the big being responsible for smaller
beings like us, but because were all in the one group of things called beings, we can
have a grasp on God. And so the assumption of onto-theology is that the human mind
can put God in a conceptual category without destroying divine transcendence.
This whole project is what Levinas rejects and characterises by the word Totality,
which he distinguishes from Infinity in which the transcendent otherness of God is
preserved as being beyond knowledge: hence the title of his great work, Totality and
Infinity. (Compare Min (2006), pp.99103; a wider, interesting discussion of ontotheology, Heidegger and Aquinas is in Westphal (2006).)
55
Kessler summarises well:

Infinity is alterity [otherness]. The Infinite is the absolute Other, Levinas writes. Its
alterity is transcendent and exterior to the subject. The Other is beyond the power
of the subject to reduce it to the same or the self. Infinity is an idea that cannot be
conceptualized, represented in consciousness or made infinite; it overflows itself, it is a
surplus of thought.
(Kessler (2002), p.443)
Levinas suggests that God, remaining transcendent, comes to be present in a way

decisive for our identity when we open ourselves up boundlessly to others in ethical
responsibility. Putting it loosely: if we live out a demanding love of others, that is how
we truly engage with God and it is the expression of what a relationship to God means
for us. Loving others is not a consequence that flows from loving God; it is how that
loving is enacted.
Returning to the interview in Ethics and Infinity the interviewer then asks Levinas:
if God is not seen, [nevertheless] he has testimony rendered to himself; if he is not
thematized [in a way that thought can express], he is attested [by the moral witness
which a person gives]. Levinas replies in these terms:
The witness testifies to what was said by himself. For he has said, Here I am! before the
Other; and from the fact that before the Other he recognizes the responsibility which is
incumbent on himself, he has manifested what the face of the Other signifies for him. The
glory of the Infinite [God] reveals itself through what it is capable of doing in the witness.
(p.109)
God is revealed, and testimony borne to him, through my making myself available
to the other person in need. Putnam points out that it is a part of Levinas strategy
to regularly transfer predicates to the Other that traditional theology ascribes to God
(Putnam, 2008, p.80). God becomes present through my moral obligation. Levinas
continues: The exteriority of the Infinite somehow becomes interiority in the
sincerity of the testimony (p.109).
We will try to express this less densely: the transcendence of God becomes immanent
and really present when a person responds to his/her moral obligations to others. Does
this mean, the interviewer asks, that the Infinite is absorbed [fused with a creature
in a way that compromises Gods transcendence]? No, says Levinas, God is present
in the person in the mode of commanding, commanding me through my mouth;
the infinitely exterior becomes an interior voice (pp.10910). Divine transcendence
is retained, but God comes to be close to us in the moment when we face up to our
responsibility for the other person. How responsible should we feel? Levinas answers
that we are not equal to the other person but the ethical demands that we place on
ourselves are greater. The fundamental obligation is asymmetrical:
The fundamental intuition of the majority perhaps consists in perceiving that I am not
the equal of the Other. This applies in the very strict sense: I see myself obligated with
regard to the Other; consequently I am infinitely more demanding of myself than of
others. The more just I am, the more harshly I am judged, states one Talmudic text.
(A Religion for Adults, pp.212; Peperzak, 1996, p.130;
Putnam, 2002, p.33 and the following)
For every man, assuming responsibility for the Other is a way of testifying to the glory
of the Infinite (Ethics and Infinity, p.113). This responsibility for others therefore
comes to be for man the meaning of his own self-identity. This self (son moi) is not
56
originally for itself (pour soi); through the will of God it is for others (Prayer
without Demand, p.230). The task of life is in making this shift towards being
unreservedly and universally for others, and the moment that shifts us towards this is
when the face of the other person in need evokes from us a response that creates and
defines us as persons; in that moment we are opened up to God.
Levinas thinks that this opening up of the self into being-for-the-other is the template,
first identified in Judaism, that is to become the pattern for all, the task at the heart of all
human life. In taking responsibility for the other [person], we testify to our responsibility
to the Other that is God. After he has killed Abel, Cain says to God, Am I my brothers
keeper? (Gen 4.9): the refusal of the murderer to recognise responsibility for his brother is
the obverse of Levinas insistence that we are responsible for one another, universally and
unreservedly. Putnam (2008) quotes these important remarks from Levinas:
I always have, myself, one responsibility more than anyone else, since I am responsible,
in addition for his responsibility. And if he is responsible for my responsibility, I remain
responsible for the responsibility he has for my responsibility it will never end. In the
society of the Torah, this process is repeated to infinity
(p.81)
Then I must say, Levinas surely implies, that my ethical responsibility is not dependent
on the recognition of a reciprocity between me and the other person, but is based on a
movement of compassion and responsibility which are brought out of me as I recognise
that my normative identity (the way I have to be if I am to live in truth) is created by
my taking responsibility for the other in his/her need. The key religious text for Levinas
is Isaiah 58 which he glosses: those who want to see the face of God and enjoy his
proximity will only see his face once they have freed their slaves and fed the hungry
(In the Time of the Nations, p.162). Read also the Servant Song of Isaiah 53 in the light
of what Levinas is proposing.
Activity
In the light of these clearly difficult but important thoughts, study the following
quotation from one of Levinas major philosophical works:
There can be no knowledge of God separated from the relationship with men.
The Other is the very locus of metaphysical truth, and is indispensable for my
relation with God. He does not play the role of a mediator. The other is not the
incarnation of God, but precisely by his face, in which he is disincarnate, is the
manifestation of the height in which God is revealed.
(Totality and Infinity, pp.7879)
a. Now write a commentary on the above quotation, trying to express what Levinas
is getting at.
b. Why does Levinas say that the Other is how God becomes present to me?
c. Read the Servant Song of Isaiah 53 in the light of what Levinas is proposing.
d. How is Levinas inspired by Isaiah 58?
e. Is he right to reject the idea of an objective revelation of God as incompatible
with divine transcendence, and to favour instead the ethical as how God is
revealed?
f. How can I be infinitely responsible? Is Levinas describing what we must do, or,
from a Christian perspective can he be seen as describing Christ who takes upon
himself responsibility for all? Is Levinas Jewish and universal ideal Christic?
57
Ethics, religion and transcendence

Reading
Levinas, A Religion for Adults; Webb (1999); Putnam (2002); 1st Epistle of St John,
chapters 35.
This takes us into a consideration of Levinas essay, A Religion for Adults. Read it
carefully, particularly the section The Ethical Relation as a Religious Relation. We will
begin with an extract from this which repays careful thought:
Ethics is not the corollary of the vision of God, it is that very vision. Ethics is an optic,
such that everything I know of God and everything I can hear of His Word and reasonably
say to Him must find an ethical expression. In the Holy Ark from which the voice of God
is heard by Moses, there are only the tablets of the Law. The knowledge of God which
we can have and which is expressed, according to Maimonides, in the form of negative
attributes, receives a positive meaning from the moral God is merciful, which means:
Be merciful like him. The attributes of God are given not in the indicative but in the
imperative. The knowledge of God comes to us like a commandment, like a Mitzvah
[commandment of the Torah]. To know God is to know what must be done.
(p.17)
You can see the continuity between these ideas and the interview studied above. The
key to this is surely that the mode of Gods presence among human beings is in the
imperative tense, commanding us. God is present in the form of commanding us to be
responsible for the good of others. Levinas is very anti-metaphysical in his approach to
God: because our thought cannot grasp God, he regards forms of religion that privilege
metaphysical inquiry as crossing a boundary which we should not cross. See his
remarks in On Jewish Philosophy:
It is my opinion that the relation to God called faith does not primordially mean adhesion
to certain statements that constitute a knowledge for which there is no demonstration To
me, religion means transcendenceThe relation to God is already ethics.
(pp.17071)
For him, transcendence is the move into a universal moral responsibility directed
towards all human beings. Transcendence for Levinas is relational, springing from a
face-to-face relation. I am affected, Levinas says, by the face of the other which is not
an object for me; I cannot use or instrumentalise this person because their otherness
(what Levinas calls alterity) evokes a response from me; the face of the person affects
me before I can begin to reflect on it. It is command and summons. The face, in its
nudity and defenceless, signifies, Do not kill me (Stanford Guide, p.13). Levinas
treats what he calls the face as an epiphany, a revelation, in which we become aware of
the Others vulnerability which calls us not to harm him or her.
In A Religion For Adults (p.13), Levinas notes the general view that the values of
Judaism have been elevated into something better and higher in the religions which
Judaism engendered [principally Christianity, but also Islam], and that Judaism is
treated as a kind of precursor whose value was in preparing the way for Christianity. But
what he wants to do is to insist on the particular quality and importance of the Judaism
that remains as a witness to God.
In the section that follows, Enthusiasm or Religious Majority, he develops this,
distinguishing the particular character of Judaism from forms of idolatry and forms
of self-serving emotional religions that he distrusts. He will present Judaism as still a
challenge to bad and false religion. In part, one suspects, he is targeting a particular
style of Christianity that he thinks indulges people and does not press them to move out
into serious ethical living. (This critique will return below when we discuss Loving the
58
Torah More than God.) He dislikes religions of enthusiasm where the numinous [the
holy imaginatively conceived] is a power that frightens and sets us in awe. He seems
to be evoking the famous description of the Holy offered by Rudolf Otto: mysterium
tremendum et fascinans: a mystery that frightens and at the same time enthrals us.
Levinas suspects that this is idolatry, a projection out of our imagination, in whose
presence we are deflected from the primacy of ethical responsibility. It takes us away
from freedom, rather than truly freeing us. In the light of this, read the following
quotation from the essay:
Editors note: by extension,

late Latin, from Greek.
The numinous or the sacred wraps and transports humans beyond their power and will.
But true freedom takes offence at these uncontrollable excesses. The numinous annuls
the relationships between persons by making beings participate albeit in ectasis1 in
a drama that is not wanted by these beings, in an order in which they dissolve. This
somehow sacramental power of the divine is seen in Judaism as an insult to human
freedom and as contradicting human education, which remains an action with regard to a
free being [. . .] The sacred that wraps me up and transports me is violence.
(Religion for Adults, p.14)
Peperzaks comment is to the point:

As a religion of the spirit Judaism is an atheism with regard to all gods; it understands
all human experiences as relations between free intelligence in the clear light of
consciousness and language. Atheism with regard to the one and only God is better than
mythical piety because monotheism presupposes that one has become adult by traversing
the doubts, the rebellion and the solitude engendered by the all too human images of
God that are the normal ones.
(Peperzak, 1996, p.128)
Human independence, human intelligence and the

destruction of the numinous
Levinas thinks that a lot of what passes for religion is a delusion and a magical
enchantment designed for the child in us. What he calls monotheism is radically
different from this free-floating human religiosity: Monotheism marks a break with a
certain conception of the Sacred. It neither unifies nor hierarchizes the numerous and
numinous gods; instead it denies them. As regards the Divine which they incarnate it
is merely atheism (pp.145). Understand this to mean that Judaism is a radical denial
of what passes for religion because it challenges our view of religion as a magical
enchantment: here you see why Levinas view of religion as ethics is so different from
how religion is generally viewed. People tend to think of religion as something close to
the paranormal (something spooky) rather than concerned with knowing the truth and
loving in practical, effective ways. In an important sentence, Levinas identifies three
qualities that are present in true religion, and of course for him, true religion is found in
Judaism: The important affirmation of human independence, of its intelligent presence
to an intelligible reality, the destruction of the numinous concept of the Sacred, entail
the risk of atheism (p.15). Let us take these phrases one by one:
The important affirmation of human independence: Judaism insists on the
autonomy of the person and our capacity to be responsible for all. Humans do not
cease to be free in true religion quite the reverse: false religions lock us into a view
of ourselves and our capacity which is demeaning and infantilises us.
The intelligent presence to an intelligible reality: there are no hidden mysteries;
only the mystery that comes to light when we act justly towards all. Revelation is
law-based, not feeling-based. To know God is to know what must be done [and
not some message about God that simply locks us into fantasy and irresponsible
living] (p.17).
59
The destruction of the numinous [magically holy] concept of the Sacred: versions
of the divine that bypass the primacy of the ethical are idolatrous. We are elected by
God, and stand before the divine presence, for the sake of justice, not mystification.
Being a person, Levinas says, is not primarily a matter of thought or self-awareness:

rather, when ones life is changed by the claim which others, in their need and in their
otherness, make on us, selfhood is created and so my core identity is that I am a person
responsible for others. This is what he means when he says that self-consciousness is
inseparable from a consciousness of justice and injustice (p.16). Self-consciousness
inevitably surprises itself at the heart of a moral consciousness. The latter cannot be
added to the former, but it provides its basic mode (p.17). through my relation to the
Other, I am in touch with God (p.17). These points are the basis of Levinas statement
that the moral relation reunites both self-consciousness and consciousness of God: being
moral is the basic, fulfilling mode of being human, and at the same time, it is how I
connect with God. Hence he can say, as we saw earlier that ethics is not the corollary of
the vision of God, it is that very vision. You do not love others because you love God,
but in loving others you love God.
Activity
How different is this from Christian teachings such as the First Epistle of John?
Contrast the features of a religion focused on the numinous and the type of religion
favoured by Levinas.
Levinas will say that we do not commune mystically with God: he is distrustful of
religions of feeling, judging that they probably indulge the self rather than challenge
or decentre it. His preference is for religions of moral law, and that is how he reads
Judaism which he distinguishes sharply from Christianity. He insists that the Scriptural
place of the divine presence, the Ark of the Covenant, contains not some form of magic
presence or supernatural force (such as was imagined in the Stephen Spielberg film,
Raiders of the Lost Ark), but only the commandments that Israel is to observe, and
thereby live. Putnam interprets:
The fundamental obligation we haveis the obligation to make ourselves available to
the neediness (and especially the suffering) of the other person. I am commanded to say
hineni [Here I am!] to the other (and to do so without reservation, just as Abrahams
hineni to God was without reservationto be a human being in the normative sense [i.e. a
person who lives out the fundamental human obligations] involves recognizing that I am
commanded to say hineni. In Levinass phenomenology, this means that I am commanded
without experiencing a commander) (my only experience of the commander is being
commanded), and without either a metaphysical explanation of the nature of the command
or a metaphysical justification for the command. If you have to ask, Why should I put
myself out for him/her?, you are not yet human.
(Putnam, 2002, p.38)
Webb (1999) takes this further: in Judaism the Torah becomes embodied in the people
who hear its commands. He sees Levinas extending this principle to all human beings
through making the ethical the mode of Gods presence to all:
Levinas extends this Jewish theme to an all-inclusive account of election, that God through
the human other eternally elects every individual to a responsibility that can never be
abrogatedIn a way, Levinas transposes into a philosophical key the singularity and
tenacity of JudaismBy identifying the divine with the ethical, Levinas moves beyond the
traditional dilemma of whether God is the logos, the order or the world and the principle of
reason, or a personal being who rules from above, intervening into human affairs.
(Webb, p.8)
60
Doing good is the act of belief itself
His re-telling of an episode in the life of the Jewish philosopher, Hannah Arendt, is
illuminating: as a young girl, she said to a rabbi Ive lost my faith. The rabbi replied,
Whos asking you for it? What matters, says Levinas, is not faith, but doing
What the rabbi meant was: Doing good is the act of belief itself. (In the Time of the
Nations, p.164) Peperzak (1996) offers the following quotation from Levinas which
bears careful study and should be read in conjunction with A Religion for Adults, p.17:
It [the fundamental message of Jewish thought] ties the meaning of all experiences to
the ethical relation among humans; it appears to the personal responsibility of man, who,
thereby, knows himself irreplaceable to realize a human society in which humans treat one
another as humans. This realization of the just society is ipso facto an elevation of man
to the society with God. This society is human happiness itself and the meaning of life.
Therefore, to say that the meaning of the real must be understood in function of ethics, is
to say that the universe is sacred. But it is sacred in an ethical sense. Ethics is an optics
of the divine. No relation to God is more right or more immediate. The Divine cannot
manifest itself except through the neighbor. For a Jew, incarnation is neither possible,
nor necessary. After all, Jeremiah himself said it: To judge the case of the poor and the
miserable, is not that to know me? says the Eternal (Jer 22.16).
(pp.13536)
Activity
Write a commentary on the last quotation from Levinas.
If you have to ask, Why should I put myself out for him/her?, you are not yet
human. Why would Levinas say this and is he right?
Compare Levinas views with I John chapters 35. Is there any difference?
Christianity and Judaism

Reading
Levinas, A Religion for Adults and To Love the Torah More than God; McDade (2004);
Webb (1999); Peperzak (1996).
Levinas notes, with some regret, what he calls the flat calm which reigns in the
Judaism regulated by the Law and by ritual (Nine Talmudic Readings, p.33), contrasted
with the stirring, dramatic character of the Christian religion and the vigour of its key
ideas: Incarnation, Redemption, Resurrection. But Christianity sails too close to a pagan
religiosity, Levinas judges. Webb (1999) writes:
How easily, one can hear Levinas ruminate, this religious drama becomes the basis
in Western culture for a cult of subjectivity, the narcissistic attention to the various
transformations of the self and the search for more sensitive technologies of selffulfillment.
(p.10)
The worship of Jesus, the Word made flesh, Levinas suggests, takes the place of ethical
action and dispenses us from the obligation to face up to the demands of the Law: if
we are forgiven anyway by the Incarnate, why bother trying? Levinas is inclined, says
Webb, to view Christianity as a way in which humans are freed from responsibility
but we cannot be freed from the basic task of being human in full ethical responsibility.
We will begin by tracing some of the ideas in A Religion for Adults. Here Levinas
opens the question of the extent of Gods forgiveness, and for a Christian, the points
made here are very striking and challenging. On p.20, he refers to Cains awareness of
61
the evil he has done: My punishment is greater than I can bear, says Cain. The rabbis,
says Levinas, use this to ask if Cains wrong is greater than God can bear. Levinas
consideration of this should be carefully studied:
Jewish wisdom teaches that He who has created and Who supports the whole universe
cannot support or pardon the crime that man commits against man. Is it possible? Did not
the Eternal efface the sin of the golden calf? [Exodus 32] This leads the master to reply:
the fault committed with regard to God falls within the province of the divine pardon,
whereas the fault that offends man does not concern God. The text thus announces the
full value and the full responsibility incurred by whosoever touches man. Evil is not a
mystical principle that can be effaced by a ritual, it is an offence perpetrated by man on
man. No one, not even God, can substitute himself for the victim. The world in which
pardon is all-powerful becomes inhuman.
(A Religion for Adults, p.20)
Notice two things here:

1. God is not able to forgive wrongs done against other persons: only the person
wronged can offer forgiveness. This is a consequence of taking responsibility
seriously. Reconciliation among human beings cannot be bypassed by a turn towards
God instead.
2. If forgiveness is all-powerful, this is bad news for humans such a world becomes
inhuman because it removes a fundamental quality of humanness, namely our
individual responsibility for what we do and sets us in a magical world in which evil
is dealt with ritually or, as Levinas will say in To Love the Torah, mystically.
This is probably, in part, a critique of a form of Christianity which Levinas sees as
bad news for humans because, in his eyes, the person of Christ is used as a substitute
for human responsibility and the presence of the Incarnate Word among us is a way
in which our human responsibility is deflected and avoided. Hence his next statement
that Judaism [by contrast with Christianity presumably] believes in the regeneration
of man without the intervention of extrahuman factors other than the consciousness of
Good, and the Law (p.20). And in all this, there is no communication of the saints
[presumably individuals are not helped by others who are more holy than themselves]
and the transitivity of the redemptive act is completely educative (p.21): a difficult
phrase but transitivity is probably to be understood as issuing in an object and so
a paraphrase might be: the goal of Gods work of redeeming us is to teach us how to
be human, i.e. ethical and responsible. There is no mechanism that replaces this [such
as, perhaps, the self-offering of the Son of God for sinners, doing for them what they
cannot do for themselves].
You may find this a bleak vision in which in the end there is no healing of the wrongs
of human history, but remember that while Judaism has a deep sense of Gods mercy
and forbearance, which Christianity has inherited, it does not have the sense which
Christianity has of a moment in history when, according to Christian faith, there is a
decisive atonement for sins, a turning point whereby the sins of humanity are taken
upon himself by Christ. Judaism looks towards a resolution but does not think that the
resolution has yet been inaugurated; in the meantime, justice must be sought and evildoing is unresolved. These ideas are given eloquent development in the next essay,
To Love the Torah More than God, and to this we now turn.
62
To Love the Torah More than God
Please note: as the text of To Love the Torah More than God has line-numbering, in
this section we will refer to particular lines rather than pages.
The background to Levinas essay is a story, originally thought to be written by a Jew
in the Warsaw Ghetto, in which Yossel ben Yossel speaks to God about the suffering
of the Jewish people. Levinas knows that it is fiction (line 17) but that it represents a
deep, authentic experience of the spiritual life (line 27). The question is whether the
suffering of the innocent (line 42) is a witness to a world without God. This, Levinas
states, is what one would say if, and the word is important here, you believe in a
childish way about God, viewing God as a rather elementary god, who awarded prizes,
imposed sanctions, or pardoned mistakes and who, in his goodness, treated people
like perpetual children (line 47 and the following). You would not be wrong to see
here a summary of the kind of God that Levinas has discussed elsewhere and rejects,
an indulgent god who does not press humans to grow up through Law and ethics. No
wonder, then, he says that there is no inhabitant in the heaven we imagine: heaven is
empty of this false God and the suffering of the innocent has made such conceptions of
the divine impossible.
Atheism, then, an atheism based on a rejection of this mythological, false God surfaces,
and it is no bad thing, says Levinas, because it can open the way to a true engagement
with the true God.
On the road that leads to the one and only god, there is a way station without God. True
monotheism must frame answers to the legitimate demands of atheism. An adult persons
faith reveals himself precisely in the emptiness of the childs heaven.
(lines 5760)
Activity
Is Levinas right to be so harsh about the childs heaven?
Can a rejection of these false ideas about God open the way to a real, adult
engagement that makes us truly adult (= responsible)?
Why does he insist that God cannot deal with the offences that humans commit
against one another?
God veiling his Countenance
Returning to To Love the Torah: Levinas then inquires into the meaning of the
suffering of the innocent as it should be viewed by an adult faith, and the phrase he
uses for this is that there are moments when God veils his face. He takes this to be
not a metaphorical expression, but a proper characterisation of the vulnerability of the
just and innocent person in this kind of world. And what kind of world is it? Levinas
replies that it is a world in which God has allowed humankind to behave according to
its wild instincts and therefore those who witness to God and truth are the first victims
of this domination (line 65). It is also characterised as a world where goodness does
not succeed in being victorious (line 77). And this, he says, is the specifically Jewish
meaning of suffering: through their witness to God in a disordered world, they testify
to a God who does not intervene to rescue his people from their affliction, but relates to
them by pressing them to witness to a God whose mode of presence brings out the best
in humans, namely, by teaching and law. Notice the phrase: this reveals a God who,
while refusing to manifest himself in any way as a help, directs his appeal to the full
maturity of the integrally responsible person (lines 7980).
63
Be clear that God is not absent in this kind of world, but his presence does not take his
people, or any of the innocent, out of the affliction which humans, given over to their wild
instincts, bring upon them. This is the issue of the relation of Gods transcendent otherness
to the human problematic. Earlier, we saw that Levinas thinks that God is present to and
in humans when they move outwards responsibly to others; God is present in the mode of
commanding, requiring that we be just, compassionate, etc. So too here: the revelation is
of a God who veils his countenance and who abandons the just person, unvictorious, to
his own justice this faraway God comes from inside (lines 813).
A strange statement but it focuses on the inner testimony to God found in conscience,
in the inner commitment to do good to others and not to be violent towards them. And
because I belong, Levinas writes (interpreting Yossel) to the suffering Jewish people,
the faraway God becomes my God (line 92). Being Jewish, Yossel says, means to be an
everlasting swimmer against the turbulent, criminal human current (lines 867) and this
witness brings an intimacy with this virile God (line 90). To say that this God is virile
is strange: presumably it means a God of tough love, not a weak, indulgent God who
makes no demands on us. It comes up again in line 130: The true humanity of Man and
his virile tenderness come into the world along with the severe words of a demanding
God. For Levinas, there must be a connection between God being virile and humans,
both men and women, being virile: an adult religion produces adult (virile = strong)
humans who live out a demanding witness in a world where goodness is not victorious.
God veils his countenance in order to demand in a superhuman way everything of
Man, to have created Man capable of responding or turning to his God as a creditor and
not all the time as a debtor (lines 13739).
These ideas are the basis of the contrast Levinas draws between Judaism and
Christianity. There are elements of a polemic here, but it is in the spirit of open debate
and comment; Levinas had a high regard for Christians but was resolutely Jewish.
Properly speaking, he says, the world was not changed by the Christian sacrifice (In
the Time of the Nations, p.162), and the suggestion is that Christian love was unable to
prevent the Holocaust. Being Christian, Europe could do nothing to put things right.
Neither by what Christians did as Christians, nor by what, in Christianity, should have
dissuaded people from performing certain acts (ibid.). The contrast between the two
religions, as he sees it, is this:
[In Judaism]the relationship between God and the human person is not an emotional
communion within the love of an incarnate God, but a relationship between minds that is
mediated by teaching, by the Torah. The guarantee that there is a living God in our midst
is precisely a word of God that is not incarnate (1027)God is present, not by means
of incarnation, but by means of the Law; and his majesty is not the felt experience of his
sacred mystery.
(In the Time of the Nations, pp.13334).
In addition, he seems to suggest that Judaism, with its strict insistence on the demands
of the Torah being met, is a better kind of religion than Christianity which, in his eyes,
is indulgent towards the evil we do. Van Beeck in his comments on To Love the Torah
will pick this up and raise questions about this contrast, as does McDade (2008).
Activity
What does Levinas think is the specifically Jewish view of suffering?
How does this contrast with a Christian view?
God seems to be both veiling his countenance but also present. How and why?
Is Christianity really an indulgent religion that sends a bad message about
responsibility? Write an imaginary letter to Levinas about this.
64
Summary
Levinas is a very challenging thinker because of the vigour of his Jewish thought which
he presents as standing in contrast with Christian teaching. You might ask if he has
under-estimated the way in which ethical responsibility for the other is placed by the
New Testament at the heart of loving God (see Matt 5.24). Does he reduce religion to
ethics? How does he think that God is present? He seems to suggest that God becomes
real in relation to us when we live out the demands of responsibility for others. God is
present in the mode of teaching and commanding, presenting us with what we should
do. The key statement is: To know God is to know what must be done; what must
be done (ethics) is the first stage in the expression of humanness and it is the first and
decisive stage in loving God.
Learning outcomes
should be able to:
discuss the relation of ethics and religion for Levinas
appreciate his account of the Jewish meaning of suffering (God veiling his
countenance)
evaluate the issues raised by his contrast of Judaism and Christianity
evaluate his view of atheism as a way station to a true monotheism
discuss why he says that There can be no knowledge of God separated from the
relationship with men.

1. To know God is to know what must be done. Discuss what Levinas means by this.
2. A world in which forgiveness becomes omnipotent becomes inhuman. Discuss.
3. Why does Levinas focus on ethics as the centre of a relationship to God?
4. Why is Levinas suspicious of religions which focus on the numinous?
65
Notes
66
Appendix 1: The tasks of life: a summary
Appendix 1:
The tasks of life: a summary

You have studied four different thinkers who address questions about human life. Each
of them identifies the problem or problems that we face and how we address the
tasks of living authentically:
Pascal thinks that we are affected by the history of sin: he takes the doctrine of
original sin very seriously (131; 695). He is concerned by what he sees as the
emergence of a cultural indifference towards God and an atheism that denies God:
why dont people see that the question of God is urgent? Because we have lost our
true good, we are in a position where anything can become our good. Human nature
is so unstable that we shift from one thing to another, get bored very easily, divert
ourselves and will do anything to avoid facing up to the emptiness at the heart of
our life. That is what is wrong with us. We are also mistaken in thinking that we
can make God an object of thought: for Pascal, reason has its place in relation to
science, mathematics, inquiry, but it is of little value in bringing us to our true good
which is God. Pascal is suspicious of approaches to God that are rationalistic or
philosophical.
God, through Jesus Christ, the sacred Scriptures, miracles, the life of the Church
and religious experience (the Memorial is an important testimony), brings people
into a living relationship with him. This is known by us through the heart. As
a follower of St Augustine, Pascal is faced with an additional difficulty: it seems
that Gods grace is not available to everyone, but is given only to some, the elect.
Others are left to carry the burden of their sins. God is present always as the hidden
God and human life is only partially illuminated by his presence. These are issues
which Pascal inherits and which he explores without questioning them. The task of
human life, for him, is to open ourselves as much as possible to God in the devout
hope that Gods grace will be given to us and that we will reach heaven. We may
prepare ourselves for grace, but we are dependent upon God for the gift of grace,
perseverance and fulfilment. A pessimistic position? Possibly. But Pascal devotes
much energy to enabling his readers to come to an accurate understanding of
themselves as a way of preparing them for divine truth. So he thinks that this is a
task that we can and ought to perform: live truthfully and devoutly with a clear
head and do not be deceived by the nonsense around us and within us. Open
yourself to the truth of how the hidden God reveals himself in Christ, in the
Church, in Scripture and in prayer.
Kafka can be interpreted in different ways: some view him as an analyst of our
modern cultural context in entirely secular terms; others find strong echoes or traces
of Jewish religion and teaching in his work. Although he is not a religious thinker
or teacher, he writes out of a Jewish religious context. He creates parables similar to
those of Jesus and Jewish illustrative anecdotes, but he does not use them to teach
moral or spiritual lessons. Rather, they are designed to alter the hearers perception
of their actual situation. Having read Kafkas stories, we are to think differently
about ourselves and our lives; he diagnoses problems rather than provides solutions.
His characters are often engaged in an obscure search for justification, for a purpose
or goal, but they do not reach it. Is Kafka saying that the aspirations of human
beings are blocked and frustrated by complexity and impersonal forces? Possibly.
Is there more to it than this?
67
His statement, a book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us shows that he
intends his stories to have an effect on the reader, but what effect is intended? He
does not provide in his stories any solution to the dilemmas which he identifies.
Before the Law is, at first reading, a grim parable about how the deep search for truth
and guidance at the heart of human life is frustrated by forces which prohibit access
to the Law. Yet the commentators show that it is open to other, more instructive
interpretation. The key must be that Kafkas stories do not have a single meaning
planted in them by their author: rather, they give the reader the stimulus to interpret
them in meaningful ways. Kafka does not teach us what the tasks of life are, but
he invites us through his fictions to experience life in a certain way. That he is a
major point of reference in our modern world is surely significant; those interested in
theology should know his work.
Weil is a religious philosopher rather than a theologian. Her position at the margins
of Christian life yet someone with a deep love of God, Christ and Christian
teaching and the vigour of her thought, which always seems to be infused with
spiritual integrity, have impressed a wide range of people since her writings were
first published. (Iris Murdoch learned much from her.) She seems to live out a
vocation of holiness at great cost, and this comes across in her writings. She seems
to know that really loving God is painful and that doing it costs you everything:
not everyone conveys that sense. Yet at the same time, she is a lucid analyst of
intractable questions such as how the suffering and affliction of the innocent is
compatible with Gods goodness. Her solution, to say that God withdraws in order
to allow an impersonal ordering of the world to have its scope, is impressive, even if
it may present problems about divine providence and risks removing God from the
world. Her Platonic analysis of the Great Beast as a parable of how human beings
internalise messages about life that are often deceptive and destructive is simple and
profound.
Her understanding of the implicit ways in which people are drawn to God through
love of neighbour, beauty and religious rituals is generous and important: it prevents
her spiritual teaching from becoming too elitist. What would her message be
about the tasks of life? Perhaps this: recognise that you are instinctively drawn
to false ways of being yourself which indulge you in self-directed fantasies
about life. But once you see past them, you set yourself on a difficult path of
becoming decentred and decreated. This may bring you affliction and lead to
a dismantling of the false self, but there may be no other way of attaining God
than by allowing this to happen. This may be what the Cross means.
Levinas is an important religious and ethical philosopher: of course for him, ethics
is at the heart of true religion. He writes: the true God is revealed in the moment
when I make myself available (Here I am!) to meet the needs of the other. In
the Jewish religion, as in Christianity, ethics is a central component: Levinas puts
forward an ethical monotheism which he distinguishes from other versions of the
sacred. He suggests that we need to move away from childish versions of God and
declare those childish versions to be false before we can find our way to a genuine
understanding of God. He suggests that atheism, understood as a rejection of
inadequate ideas about God, is a way station on the way to genuine theism. There
is, he suggests, a particular Jewish interpretation of suffering which is different from
the Christian interpretation: it is the condition of a witness in a world where justice
is not victorious.
68
Appendix 1: The tasks of life: a summary
Rejecting forms of religion which seem to indulge us in self-directed fantasies

about the numinous that enchants us, he makes moral obligation, love for the other
(Leviticus 19.18) the expression of true connectedness to God. He presents this as,
partly, a critique of Christianity which he interprets as a religion that indulges us
in our weakness and does not press us to grow up to full ethical responsibility. Yet
his emphases are also found in Christian teachings such as the First Epistle of John.
Levinas presents insights within Judaism about the centrality of ethics to the task
of loving God as teaching that can be universalised so that all human beings might
recognise the first task of life to be that of living out their responsibility for the needs
of others. An implicit way of loving God for Levinas? He might say that ethical
responsibility, understood in this way, is the act of loving God. To know God is
to know what must be done would be his formula for the task of life.
69
Notes
70
Appendix 2: Sample examination paper
Appendix 2:
Sample examination paper

Time allowed: three hours.
Answer FOUR questions.
1. Discuss Pascals view of boredom and diversion.
2. The heart has its reasons which the mind does not know. Discuss.
3. Is it helpful to make the distinction that Pascal makes between the God of Abraham,
the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God of Jesus Christ and the God of the
philosophers and the learned?
4. Is Weils interpretation of the Great Beast useful?
5. God hands the world over to necessity and free human choice. Discuss the issues at
stake here.
6. Discuss Weils view of the three implicit ways of loving God.
7. How does Levinas relate ethics and religion?
8. The world in which pardon is all-powerful becomes inhuman. Why does Levinas
say this and is he right?
9. Is it right to think that when Levinas universalizes Judaism, he is in danger of
exaggerating the importance of ethics?
10. With reference to three stories, how does Kafka cast light on fundamental human
questions?
11. How should one interpret Kafkas story Before the Law?
12. Human life is under judgment. If this is Kafkas main metaphor for our life, what
are we meant to do about it?
13. Compare how two of the writers think of the tasks of life.
14. Write a letter from Levinas to Kafka about what he should know about Judaism.
15. Discuss how Levinas and Weil interpret suffering and affliction.
71
Notes
72

DT3013 The Tasks of Life

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The tasks of life:

Pascal, Kafka, Weil

Published by: University of London Press

The tasks of life: Pascal, Kafka, Weil and Levinas

Chapter 3: Simone Weil (190943)...................................................................................39

The Philosophical Writings

(Oxford University Press,

The tasks of life: Pascal, Kafka, Weil and Levinas

Aims and objectives

How to use this guide

Blaise Pascal (162362): a scientific and mathematical innovator, a literary satirist

Franz Kafka (18831924): for many people he is the characteristic voice of

religious thought. Brought up atheist in France, involved in socialist activism,

Emmanuel Levinas (190696): the most important Jewish philosopher of the

twentieth century, and a disciple of Husserl whose phenomenology shaped Levinas

Reading for this subject

The Online Library consists

The tasks of life: Pascal, Kafka, Weil and Levinas

Recommendation on study time

As the Student Handbook (available online at www.londoninternational.ac.uk/current_

Sample examination paper

There is a Sample examination paper in Appendix 2.

Different texts and how to read them

Writerly texts (Textes scriptibles)

The text seems to be transparent: we see

The text is opaque (thick) and does not

The author guides the reader as to how

The characterisation and plot is

The reader is given a panoptic

The perspective offered to the reader is in

The text is marked by authorial

The text is marked by authorial silence

The work is easy to read because, unlike

The work is difficult to interpret and

Table 0.1: Readerly/Writerly texts (Textes lisibles/Textes scriptibles)

The tasks of life: Pascal, Kafka, Weil and Levinas

A reminder of your learning outcomes

Chapter 1: Blaise Pascal (162362)

Blaise Pascal (162362)

Pascal, B. Penses translated by A.J. Krailsheimer (Penguin, 2003) [ISBN 0140446451;

The tasks of life: Pascal, Kafka, Weil and Levinas

How to read the Penses

Chapter 1: Blaise Pascal (162362)

Textual commentaries on the Penses

The tasks of life: Pascal, Kafka, Weil and Levinas

Chapter 1: Blaise Pascal (162362)

Pascals Night of Fire

Pense 913; McDade, J. Interpreting Pascals Memorial; O Connell (1997), pp.95105.

The tasks of life: Pascal, Kafka, Weil and Levinas

people how to be lucid about themselves, to induce a sense of human truthfulness;

Pascals distinction between a misguided version of Christian faith (worshipping

Chapter 1: Blaise Pascal (162362)

Boredom and diversion

The tasks of life: Pascal, Kafka, Weil and Levinas

Pascal on the Three Orders

Chapter 1: Blaise Pascal (162362)

only those touched

Table 1.1: Pascals Three Orders

Some comments on Pascals Three Orders

The tasks of life: Pascal, Kafka, Weil and Levinas

God and revelation

Chapter 1: Blaise Pascal (162362)

Lost in the cosmos