Effort and Grace

On the Spiritual Exercise of Philosophy

Simone Kotva

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350194755
• eBook ISBN: 9781350113664
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Philosophy and theology have long harboured contradictory views on spiritual practice. While philosophy advocates the therapeutic benefits of daily meditation, the theology of grace promotes an ideal of happiness bestowed with little effort. As such, the historical juxtaposition of effort and grace grounding modern spiritual exercise can be seen as the essential tension between the secular and sacred. In Effort and Grace, Simone Kotva explores an exciting new theory of spiritual endeavour from the tradition of French spiritualist philosophy. Spiritual exercise has largely been studied in relation to ancient philosophy and the Ignatian tradition, yet Kotva's new engagement with its more recent forms has alerted her to an understanding of contemplative practice as rife with critical potential. Here, she offers an interdisciplinary text tracing the narrative of spiritual exertion through the work of seminal French thinkers such as Maine de Biran, Félix Ravaisson, Henri Bergson, Alain (Émile Chartier), Simone Weil and Gilles Deleuze. Her findings allow both secular philosophers and theologians to understand how the spiritual life can participate in the contemporary philosophical conversation.

1

The spiritual exercise of philosophy: Two ideals

Spiritual exercise has been used to understand the method of philosophy ever since the early modern period and retains to this day its hold upon the imagination. The motivation is not difficult to fathom. In its most general sense, spiritual exercise is a means of focussing attention, and philosophy is said to begin with attention, or the ability to wonder and look closely at the world.¹ The father of the modern discipline of spiritual exercise, Ignatius of Loyola, for this reason contrasted the concentration demanded by spiritual exercise with distraction, arguing that periodic retreat allowed the practitioner to avoid ‘having his [sic] understanding divided on many things, but concentrating his care on one thing only, namely, on serving his Creator and benefiting his own soul’.² Necessarily, the philosophical innovators of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were enthralled by the idea. Suspicious of scholastic logic and book-learning, René Descartes nonetheless desired the same clear vision of truth aimed at by the pre-moderns. And now here was a simple method. Relying on nothing but attention, how easily might not humanity become, at last, masters and possessors of nature. With the early modern transformation of spiritual exercise into a scientific method, philosophy would realize what had previously been considered a wholly religious enterprise. Soon the desire to converse with God in prayer was removed from its contemplative context. In these two forms – the one religious and the other in effect methodological – spiritual exercise has been represented in modern European philosophy which is, in the broadest sense, the subject of this book.

Spiritual exercise is a tradition with a long history. Yet most of the authors I will be considering here wrote in the nineteenth century. It is my claim, however, that the tradition of nineteenth-century philosophy that frames my discussion – French spiritualism – draws on spiritual exercise in ways that address directly the question of philosophical method which has become significant in recent years. There are today many studies which, following the example of Pierre Hadot, use spiritual exercise to question the notion that philosophy begins with theory. Presentations of philosophy as ‘therapy’, ‘practice’ and ‘technique’ point to a growing sense that knowledge does not resemble a Newtonian constant but a morphic field, its evolving outlines shaped by habits, accumulated actions and unconscious desires. Such studies, however, begin with the assumption that philosophy, presented as exercise, prioritizes practice over theory; even that practice and theory are fundamentally opposed. My purpose is to show both the potency of this opposition – how it has come to organize everyday life – and with what resistance it has been met. It is my claim that in order to appreciate the questioning which spiritual exercise brings to bear on philosophy it is necessary to study the relation between the ethical and the way of thinking called ‘metaphysics’. As such, this book is aimed at both philosophers and theologians, with the hope that it will clarify how exercise – skilled, failed and resumed – has shaped and continues to shape the modern condition.³

I

First, however, the claim that the significance of spiritual exercise today rides on an apparent opposition between ethics and metaphysics demands justification. For it would seem that any exercise qualified by ‘spirit’ is already pointing towards the invisible and so admits to principles and foundations in excess of practice.⁴ What, then, are the motivations, in past centuries and our own, that could lead spiritual exercise to detach itself from the spiritual? The answer to this question will begin with a distinction between two ideals of spiritual exercise: one that tends to emphasize effort, or what a person can achieve of their own volition, the other that tends to focus instead on passivity, or what a person can achieve by letting go of the will and surrendering to a more-than-human power. How the two ideals are weighed and related to one another will determine the way the ‘spiritual’ in ‘spiritual exercise’ is understood. In brief, where effort is the principal interest, spirit tends to diminish in significance. Conversely, where passivity is recognized – and its associated affects, such as receptivity, relaxation and abandonment – the sense of the ‘spiritual’ typically will increase.

The first, active and exertive interpretation of spiritual exercise is not easy to grasp as it has become very widespread. The idea that happiness is the result of the hard work applied by an individual to themselves makes itself known in a variety of ways. The influential work of Pierre Hadot is one straightforward example. In Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (1981–7), Hadot chose to refer to ancient philosophy as a form of spiritual exercise. ‘Attention (prosoche)’, he claimed, ‘is the fundamental Stoic spiritual attitude.’⁵ It was a bold statement, claiming an affinity between the spiritual exercise tradition of Christian writers like Ignatius of Loyola and Stoic philosophers like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Yet for Hadot the appeal of identifying Stoicism with spiritual exercise lay precisely in the degree to which it could show philosophy to be quite distinct from metaphysical concerns – concerns which, in the case of the Stoics no less than Ignatius, involved all manner of cosmological and theological beliefs. ‘This, of course’, he admits, ‘presupposes that we reduce these philosophies to their spirit and essence, detaching them from their outmoded cosmological or mythical elements, and disengaging from them the fundamental propositions that they themselves considered essential.’⁶ In other words, while Hadot recognized the significance of ‘spiritual’ matters for the originators of spiritual exercise, he contended that it was possible to perform spiritual exercises without the spiritual elements fundamental to the context for which they were written. From this striking shift in perspective, two results follow. In the first place, the ‘spirit and essence’ of spiritual exercise are perceived to be distinct from the concerns one might otherwise recognize as ‘spiritual’: belief in spirits, gods and more-than-human powers – the sort of concerns that occupied the ancient Stoics and Ignatius. In the second place, and in lieu of the ‘spiritual’ in the sense of the more-than-human, Hadot’s definition of spiritual exercise becomes centred on the sphere of the individual human and what the individual may achieve through their own efforts. ‘Philosophy was a way of life, both in its exercise and effort to achieve wisdom,’ writes Hadot.⁷ In an interview with his English translator, Hadot stated succinctly the purpose of spiritual exercises as a form of internal work: ‘We must … fortify ourselves by preparing ourselves against hardships in advance.’⁸ In other words, where the spiritual in spiritual exercise was concerned, metaphysics would proceed from ethics, or, what for Hadot came to the same thing, from effort.⁹

We shall have occasion to return to Hadot; for now, I will remark that although the idea of achieving wisdom through individual effort certainly is not foreign to ancient philosophy and forms an important part of the overall method of spiritual exercise, even Socrates – the perennial model for philosophers and Hadot’s principal source of inspiration – did not consider such wisdom possible by effort alone. After all, to argue that human reason, and so human effort, may be limited in relation to wisdom and unable to comprehend it fully is the philosophical meaning behind the daimon or ‘spirit’ that in Plato’s dialogues interrupts Socrates’ thoughts at crucial points; as it is, also, the philosophical meaning behind the gods and oracles from which Socrates (much to the embarrassment of his interlocutors) claims to receive knowledge.¹⁰ ‘Receive’ is the key word here, for what spiritual exercise – as distinct from human effort – draws attention to is the significance, for wisdom, of a style of thinking and doing that is different from effort and yet not separate from it; a style of thinking and doing that the handbooks of spiritual exercise would call ‘receptive’ and would associate, closely, with the experience of intuition, inspiration, illumination and other ‘passive’ modes of knowing distinct from the ‘active’ modes associated with reason and intellect. As David Marno has shown in a recent series of important studies, even when a writer like Ignatius praises effort and encourages a strict discipline of meditation, the Spiritual Exercises (1522–4) acknowledges that the ‘spiritual relish and fruit’ of meditation may arrive through divine illumination – spontaneously, and with no effort on the part of the meditator.¹¹ Spiritual relish might be achieved by effort, but it might also be received unsolicited, through grace. Here it is deliberately unclear whether what the spiritual exercise does is to prepare for, rather than directly solicit, grace. Several later writers in the same tradition responded keenly to this problem. The guided meditations of Francis de Sales, John of the Cross and François Fénelon, for instance, argue that to present prayer as a voluntary effort was to ignore entirely the weakness of the will, for no amount of voluntary effort could conjure up God or happiness or virtue. They addressed this aporia by understanding meditation as an activity that was easy as well as difficult, more like ‘waiting’ than willing. Instead of attention achieving grace by its own efforts, a degree of passivity ensured that attention, in Marno’s words, ‘prepare[d] for divine grace without taking any action to solicit it’.¹²

Such alternative traditions of spiritual exercise, Marno argues, in which effort is not elevated but subjected to scrutiny, and in which passivity serves as the metaphor for thinking through the idea of wisdom, remained significant throughout the early modern period and persisted into the twentieth century. And Marno mentions what is undoubtedly the most famous example: the work of the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil.¹³ When Weil wanted to explain the practice of prayer she drew on John of the Cross, calling ‘attention’ (l’attention) ‘waiting’ (l’attente).¹⁴ Weil’s most striking idea, attention as ‘waiting’ was an attempt to understand the nature of spiritual exercise in ways that did not rely wholly on the will. In prayer a person makes an effort to meditate and pay attention, and yet there is no expectation that attention itself will produce grace, for grace arrives unsolicited. So attention is both active and passive; it is, she explained, a ‘kind of passive activity’ or a ‘negative effort’.¹⁵ Weil took this concept of passive attention very far, using it to question what she saw as modern culture’s valorization of the will and of ‘muscular effort’ more generally. We tend, said Weil, to think about attention as something one does in order to achieve a goal, when in fact any philosopher will tell you that they arrived at their greatest discoveries not when they were exerting themselves to the utmost but when they were no longer trying and had as it were become unconscious of the fact of paying attention. Prayer, she thought, operated in exactly the same way, and so did philosophical method. In order to find the truth, it is necessary to set out in search for it, but it is also necessary to desist from trying too hard. Neither action nor passivity grounds spiritual exercise; it is the paradox of effort and grace that shapes it.

Weil’s intuitions guide the enquiry into the philosophy of spiritual exercise undertaken in this book. While few now read her as a philosopher of spiritual exercise, recent developments in the study of attention have rediscovered her ideas and offer an opportunity to address philosophy’s ambivalence over passivity, and more importantly to better our understanding of the nature of spiritual exercise itself. In the last two decades, philosophers and critics have begun to take seriously the idea of passivity in attention and to theorize it, often with particular reference to Weil. Marno we have already mentioned. In his study of John Donne’s poetry, Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention (2016), Marno discusses the dynamics of what he calls ‘easy attention’, a concept drawn from the same early modern sources that also inspired Weil. Marno’s idea of ‘easy attention’ is very close to Weil’s idea of ‘passive activity’, and I will be returning to it later on when thinking about the togetherness of action and passivity in spiritual exercise.¹⁶ I will also consider, briefly, the work of Iris Murdoch, who drew on Weil’s concept of passive attention in her moral philosophy, using it to scrutinize not only what she – like Weil – recognized as modernity’s tendency to valorize human effort, but also what she perceived to be modernity’s tacit (and sometimes not so tacit) elevation of chauvinist ideals.¹⁷ And there are other thinkers one might discuss: at around the same period that Murdoch took impression from Waiting on God, Weil was the subject of Giorgio Agamben’s earliest scholarship, which has since been characterized by a concern for passivity and a recognition of weakness at the centre of human experience. Although Agamben is not dealt with here, many of the arguments in the present chapter will be found to resonate with the ‘weak thought’ and philosophy of radical passivity that has developed around and beyond Agamben’s thought in the work of figures like Gianni Vattimo and, more recently, Marika Rose.¹⁸

II

But quite aside from Weil and the influence of her ideas on later thinkers, the questions she raises speak to a long history of philosophers choosing to think with passivity as a way of kicking back against the norms of modern Western culture. From Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Schelling and the Romantic philosophers, to the Frankfurt school and the phenomenology of Michel Henry, there are many who have challenged modernity’s fascination with effort. Whenever Enlightenment ideals are questioned, whenever philosophers confront the prerogatives of the ‘active’ faculties of reason, renewed attention will be given to the ‘passive’ faculties of intuition, feeling and pleasure; the ascetic’s fear of the body and desire to conquer its passions thus becomes contrasted, typically, with another kind of asceticism, one that would cultivate instead an intense enjoyment of ‘passive’ embodiment.¹⁹ Even, Friedrich Nietzsche, who celebrated the will and self-discipline (and who, like Hadot, praised the Stoics), was suspicious of self-discipline when allied to power. For those thinkers who have followed on from Nietzsche’s approach to philosophy as an imperative to work on oneself – such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Peter Sloterdijk in particular – asceticism operates as both ideal and caution. The question of recovering the exercise of the will and of self-discipline, of recovering the practice of philosophy in order to think with its concepts – these are seen as mostly inseparably from the realization that discipline for its own sake does not cross paths with wisdom. Effort without repose is like work without pleasure.²⁰ The researches of Josef Pieper – a philosopher contemporaneous with Weil, and, like her, a keen reader of mysticism – are particularly relevant to this discussion. Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture (1948) showed how, in the wake of social Darwinism, twentieth-century culture has tended to equate virtue with strength and, concomitantly, to regard relaxation as a sign of weakness and inferiority.²¹ Like Max Weber, Pieper traces modernity’s suspicion of relaxation to the success of the protestant work ethic, but he also reaches further back into the centuries. He sketches a long history of philosophers viewing the ‘passive’ faculties of intuition, feeling and inclination negatively as belonging to ‘animal’ nature, above which human beings were thought to be elevated precisely through their ability to exercise reason ‘actively’. He also points to the misogyny implicit in such divisions, evident whenever the active/passive distinction is mapped onto gender binaries and women’s thinking becomes associated essentially with the opposite of reason.²² For Pieper a good example of this modern position in which the good is equated not only with effort but with reason is Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy: ‘Indeed, according to Kant, the moral law by definition is opposed to natural inclination.’²³ As a consequence, whatever is good is so through the effort of the will to rise above and conquer ‘animal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Note on text and translations
• 1 The spiritual exercise of philosophy: Two ideals
• 2 The spiritual life: Maine de Biran
• 3 Grace: Félix Ravaisson
• 4 Effort: Henri Bergson and Alain (Émile Chartier)
• 5 The paradox of attention: Simone Weil
• 6 Epilogue: Reclaiming attention
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint