Simone Weil on Music: Listening with Tears of Prayerful Silence

Abstract

does not reside in notes; resides in a relationship; and yet makes one weep. That how man made: Relationships touch him physically. (1) which unites Christ on the to his Father at an infinite distance dwells in every saintly soul.... In such a soul the of and the echoes perpetually in a perfect (2) I. Introduction essential character of music relational for Simone Weil (1909-1943). delimiting, distancing emotions evidenced through weeping are produced not merely by denoted sounds and their modulations, but rather by the artistically forged cosmos that constitutes an order, a unity, which apprehended by inwardness through the senses. That order, that unity, ultimately expresses for Weil the tacit spiritual or between God's original creative fiat that one with the re-creative in Christ abandoned on the Cross and the human soul as embodiment of that love. Weil considers the truly musical as an implicit dialogue [between] and the [as it] echoes perpetually in a perfect harmony. Thus central to an understanding of Weil's core and essential view on music not only Christ's cry or his suffering and death on the Cross, but also the Father's silence as pervasive tacit ground of the of the cosmos which underlies the phenomenal world of human experience. These two complementary notions lead me to examine how they open Weil to a communion with she calls a greater reality (GG, 34) that infinitely more real than the world of gravity, necessity, change, and time. (3) has left in (WR, 424), Weil writes, and thus time God's waiting for to return to him: The stars, the mountains, the sea, and all the things that speak to of convey God's supplication to us (WR, 424). It a function of music, says Weil, to give voice to this relationship between humanity by God and God's call to in the crucified Christ, inviting to pierce through so that we find eternity behind it (WR, 494). concerned with (4) yet for Weil a manifestation of beyond or of time: (5) Music unfolding in time captures the attention and bears away of time by bringing to bear at each instant on is. (6) Therefore, attention to music or to art or to things in general functions for Weil as the soul's movement into God. Stated differently, attention to music for Weil a form of prayer by those who open themselves to higher or newer levels of auditory reception, so that they become attentive in ways that they never listened or heard before. Attention, Weil writes, taken to its highest degree, the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love (GG, 105). (7) In musical attention as prayer, life passes from what is to outside of time, from reason to faith, and from speech to silence; music, by capturing our attention, leads to contemplate or to pray, and thus helps the soul to achieve contact or union with God. Weil's notion that music aids in our contact or union with God, or that music expresses religious ideas, in line with the musical aesthetics or philosophies of Pythagoras, Plato, Augustine, and Schopenhauer--to name but a few. Weil herself tells that the ideas of limit, measure, equilibrium, proportion, and harmony constitute the very soul of the Greeks--the Pythagoreans, Socrates, Plato (WR, 164). Greek mind, Weil goes on to say, could imagine a harmonious universe, because attached great importance to (WR, 299). This emphasis on numbers led Pythagoras to contemplate the relationship between the numerical relationships that permeate the universe and numerical ratios in musical But more than this, attracted Weil to Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans was their use of mathematics as a means of purification of the soul: (8) Purity of soul was their concern; to 'imitate God' was the secret of it. …