ISRAEL
Christendom has become totalitarian, conquering, and exterminating, because it has not developed the idea of God’s absence and non-activity here below. It has attached itself to Jehovah no less than to Christ, and conceived of Providence in the manner of the Old Testament. Only Israel could stand up to Rome, because it resembled it; and this is how the birth of Christianity was marked with the Roman stain before it became the official religion of the Empire. The evil done by Rome has never been truly redressed.
God’s promises to Moses and Joshua were purely temporal, made at a time when Egypt was moving towards the eternal salvation of the soul. Having refused the Egyptian revelation, the Hebrews got the God they deserved: a carnal and collective God who, right up to the exile, did not speak (except in the Psalms?) to a single soul…. The only pure individuals in the poems of the Old Testament are Abel, Enoch, Noah, Melchisedek, Job, and Daniel. It is not surprising that little could be expected of such a people, fugitive slaves, conquerors of a paradise which had been fashioned by civilizations in whose labour they had not shared and which they destroyed through massacres. To speak of an ‘educational God’ in connection with this people is a cruel joke.
It is not astonishing that there should be so much evil in a civilization—ours—contaminated to the core, in its very inspiration, by this terrible lie. The curse of Israel rests on Christendom. Israel meant atrocities, the Inquisition, the extermination of heretics and infidels. Israel meant (and to a certain extent still does …) capitalism. Israel means totalitarianism, especially with regard to its worst enemies.
There can be no personal contact between man and God except through the person of the Mediator. Without the latter, God can only be present to man collectively, nationally. Israel chose the national God and simultaneously rejected the Mediator; it may, at one time or another, have moved towards true monotheism, but it always fell back on, and was unable not to fall back on, the God of the tribe.
Anyone who has contact with the supernatural is essentially sovereign, for in the form of the infinitely small he is a presence in society which transcends the social order.
But the place he occupies in the social hierarchy is completely immaterial. As for what is great in the social order, only he is capable of it who who has harnessed a large part of the Great Beast’s energy. But he can have no share in the supernatural.
Moses, Joshuah—that is the share in the supernatural of those who have harnessed much social energy. Israel was an attempt at supernatural social life. No country, presumably, has suceeded better at this kind of thing. Useless to start again. The result shows just what sort of divine revelation the Great Beast is capable of.
Isaiah the first to bring pure illumination.
Israel stood up to Rome because its God, even though immaterial, was a temporal sovereign on a par with the Emperor, and thanks to this Christianity could be born. The religion of Israel was not noble enough to be fragile, and due to its solidity could protect belief in the most elevated.[23]
For the Passion to be possible, it was necessary that Israel ignore the idea of the Incarnation. Rome, too (these were, perhaps, the only two peoples to ignore it). But it was necessary that Israel have some share in God. As great a share as possible without being spiritual or supernatural. Exclusively collective religion. It was because of this ignorance, this darkness, that it became the chosen people. So one can understand Isaiah, ‘I have hardenend their hearts, so that they may not hear my words.’
That is why, in Israel, everything is sullied by sin, as there is no purity without participating in the divine incarnation, so that a lack of such participation should be obvious.
Jacob’s struggle with the angel – is not this the great blemish? ‘The Eternal … will do justice to Jacob according to his works. In his mother’s womb did he already displace his brother, and, in his manliness, triumph over a God. He fought against an angel and was vanquished, and here he cries and asks for mercy …’ Isn’t this the great tragedy, to battle against God and not to be vanquished?
Israel. From Abraham onwards (including himself, but excepting some of the prophets), and as though it had been planned, everything becomes sullied and foul, as if to demonstrate quite clearly: Look! There it is, evil!
A people chosen for its blindness, chosen to be Christ’s executioner.
The Jews, that handful of uprooted people, have caused the uprootedness of the whole terrestrial globe. Their involvement in Christianity has made of Christendom, in regard to its own past, something uprooted. The orientation of the Enlightenment, 1789, secularism, etc. have infinitely increased this uprooting, through the lie of progress. And uprooted Europe has uprooted the rest of the world, by colonial conquest. Capitalism, totalitarianism, have a share in this progressive uprootedness; the antisemites, naturally, propagate the Jewish influence. But before Assyria in the Orient and Rome in the Occident uprooted through poison, they had alreardy uprooted with the broadsword.
It was primitive Christianity that fabricated the poisonous idea of progress, through the notion of a divine education that was to mould man and enable him to receive the message of Christ. This accorded with the expectation as imminent phenomena of a universal conversion of nations and the end of the world. But as neither of these had come about, the notion of progress was, after seventeen centuries, extended beyond the moment of the Christian Revelation. At this point, it had to turn itself against Christianity.
The other poisons mixed with the truth in Christianity are Jewish in origin. The former is specifically Christian.
The metaphor of a divine education dissolves the individual destiny, which alone matters for salvation, into the destiny of a people.
Christianity wanted to look for a harmony in history. This is the germ of Hegel and Marx. The notion of history as a directed continuity is a Christian notion.
It seems to me that few ideas could be more utterly mistaken.
Looking for harmony in the future, in what is contrary to eternity. Bad union of contraries.
Humanism and what has arisen out of it, is not a return to antiquity, but a development of poisons that are internal to Christianity.
It is supernatural love that is free. In trying to force it, one substitutes for it a natural love. Conversely, however, freedom without supernatural love—that of 1789—is entirely empty, a simple abstraction, with no possibility of ever becoming real.
[23] Note, as Simone Weil does here, that on the one hand the history of Israel contains flashes of pure mysticism (Isaiah, etc.); and that, on the other hand, incipient Christanity was protected by its Jewish ‘shell’. This is already to legitimate Israel’s divine mission.
