Simone Weil on Music: Listening with Tears of Prayerful Silence

Music does not reside in notes; it resides in a relationship; and yet it makes one weep. That is how man is made: Relationships touch him physically.¹

The love which unites Christ abandoned on the Cross to his Father at an infinite distance dwells in every saintly soul. . . . In such a soul the dialogue of Christ’s cry and the Father’s silence echoes perpetually in a perfect harmony.²

I. Introduction

The essential character of music is “relational” for Simone Weil (1909–1943). The 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 is apprehended by inwardness through the senses. That order, that unity, ultimately expresses for Weil the tacit spiritual “dialogue” or “relationship” between God’s original creative “fiat” that is one with the re-creative love 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] Christ’s cry and the Father’s silence [as it] echoes perpetually in a perfect harmony.” Thus central to an understanding of Weil’s core and essential view on music is 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 silence 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 what she calls a “greater reality” (GG, 34) that is infinitely more real than the world of gravity, necessity, change, and time.³ “God has left us abandoned in time” (WR, 424), Weil writes, and thus time is God’s waiting for us to return to him: “The stars, the mountains, the sea, and all the things that speak to us of time, convey God’s supplication to us” (WR, 424). It is a function of music, says Weil, to give voice to this relationship between humanity abandoned by God and God’s call to us in the crucified Christ, inviting us to pierce through time, so that we “find eternity behind it” (WR, 494). Music is concerned with time,⁴ yet for Weil it is a manifestation of beyond or outside of time:⁵ “Music unfolding in time captures the attention and bears it away outside of time by bringing it to bear at each instant on what 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 is 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, is 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 us to contemplate or to pray, and thus it 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, is in line with the musical aesthetics or philosophies of Pythagoras, Plato, Augustine, and Schopenhauer—to name but a few. Weil herself tells us that the ideas of limit, measure, equilibrium, proportion, and harmony constitute the very soul of the Greeks—the Pythagoreans, Socrates, Plato (WR, 164). The Greek mind, Weil goes on to say, could imagine a harmonious universe, because it attached great “importance to numbers” (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 harmony. But more than this, what attracted Weil to Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans was their use of...