The sermon in church this morning focused on as aspect of the Cain and Abel story that struck me in a fresh way. The aspect that struck me was the meaning in Hebrew of Abel or "Havel" as having a sense of vapor or emptiness. My thoughts instantly went to Simone Weil's notion of affliction since it gets at the same phenomenon of what it means when another person becomes merely an object – be it of rage, self-aggrandizement, satiation, etc. I also thought of Vladimir Putin's response to a question in 2001 following the 9/11 attacks regarding Al Quaeda where he said, "We are as dust to them". I took this concept in a very different direction.
There is a definite sense of nothingness in killing. The one who is killed by another has no value as a human being at all. They are nothing. One becomes as ground and rotting meat at the hands of the killer. Abel was nothing to Cain and Cain's envy degraded the very nature of Abel not only as his kin, but as a human being. It is worse than cannibalism since even then the human has some worth. Cannibalistic cultures ritualize death and do not take it lightly. Other cultures understand death in this way – as a source of life. But for Cain, death was ridding himself of a nuisance, a fly in his soup struggling for its last breath. Abel was nothing but a contaminate – a source of emptiness.
This stretches the meaning of the term a bit, but it gives it teeth in this death obsessed, but almost hopelessly anxious culture that fears death as a source of emptiness. We parody it on our screens as a proxy to avoid it. We escape the void with the comforts of living as if these comforts are a source of the eternal that overcomes death by necessity. Yet death is inevitable and necessary to living as gravity and heat are for this planet to be a habitable place for life.
Evil is that source of reality in which life is viewed as nothingness. It is where the void of death is transposed and forced onto presence and life against the will of any "other" one may encounter. It ranges in extremes from the annoyance of the slow driver in the left lane who becomes a mere object of annoyance rather than a human being, to the rape victim dragged against her will into an alley, to the trooper getting blown to bits by a car bomb. It is torture at the hands of dogmatism, it is mutilation for the ephemeral pleasure of a sadomasochist. It is any situation in which a life becomes a thing to satiate the whim or rage of another, and something less than that which exists to receive what is good. It is becoming a rock to skip along the water, or become trampled under the tread of a tank.
Simone Weil's understanding of affliction goes way beyond the notion of human suffering in this regard. The afflicted are these things and far less. It is the slave, the holocaust victim, the gladiator being devoured by a lion for the viewing pleasure of the emperor. It is something that the human race is profoundly ignorant of and something that we perpetrate perhaps more regularly than we delude ourselves into thinking that we do not. From "The Love of God and Affliction":
As for those who have been struck by one of those blows that leave a being struggling on the ground like a halfcrushed worm, they have no words to express what is happening to them. Among the people they meet those who have never had contact with affliction in its true sense can have no idea what it is, even though they have suffered a great deal. Affliction is something specific and impossible to describe in any other terms, as sounds are to anyone who is deaf and dumb. As for those who have themselves been mutilated by affliction, they are in no state to help anyone at all, and they are almost incapable of wishing to do so. Thus compassion for the afflicted is an impossibility. When it is really found we have a more astounding miracle than walking on water, healing the sick, or even raising the dead.
It is this sublime sense of the grotesque essence of the afflicted that is enigmatic and impossible for the average person not only to help, but to begin to heal. It is not something that we can expect to resolve, fix, or justify. It escapes rationalization, logic, or the capacity of the human to love. It is the initial reaction and lasting impression of the allied troops when the first entered Buchenwald and Auschwitz. It is that which creates an infinite distance from God and from the good. It is a distance from God that only God can traverse.
God created through love and for love. God did not create anything except love itself, and and the means to love. He created love in all its forms. He created beings capable of love from all possible distances. Because no other could do it, he went himself to the greatest possible distance, the infinite distance. This infinite distance between God and God, this supreme tearing apart, this agony beyond all others, this marvel of love, is the crucifixion. Nothing can be further from God than that which has been made accursed.
Related posts:
