Phenomenology and Religion: New Frontiers

rosa maria lupo

chooses to not exercise His power, God renounces His peculiar
determination, destroys Himself for his creature, and abdicates His
own power. Creation is the visibility of God’s love making Himself
invisible in the created so that the created can realize itself. The
creation is the “decreation” of God:^33

L’inflexible nécessité, la misère, la dêtresse, le poids écrasant de besoin

et du travail qui épuise, la cruauté, les tortures, la mort violente, la

contrainte, la terreur, les maladies — tout cela c’est l’amour divin. C’est

Dieu qui par amour se retire de nous afin que nous puissions l’aimer.

Car si nous étions exposés au rayonnement direct de son amour, sans

la protection de l’espace, du temps et de la matière, nous serions

évaporés comme l’eau au soleil. [... ] La nécessité est l’écran mis entre

Dieu et nous pour que nous puissions être.^34

The perspective of God as gift clarifies the opening of God to the
human, which Weil calls a “descending movement” [mouvement de-
scendant] of God in the direction of the human. In fact, this relationship
between the divine and the human is possible not because the human
has the capability of discovering God, but because God comes to him.
If the distance between God and the human being is radically absolute,
infinite, then the human possibilities remain always limited and
cannot fill the space of the distance. Instead, God has the power to
make the distance insignificant, inoperative. In this way, it is God who
moves Himself toward the creature, not a movement from the created:
the movement of crossing between the divinity and the human is
descendant and never montant. Equally, the gift covers the same
descending itinerary from the one who gives to the other who receives.
But this crossing allows the human eye to perceive the light of the

33. In this way Weil affirms that God’s presence happens at two levels: God is in
    act present at the moment of the creation, but He remains present without the
    possibility of our seeing Him in the created, because of His constant “decreation:”
    “Présence de Dieu. Cela doit sentendre de deux façon. Pour autant qu’il est créa-
    teur, Dieu est present en toute chose qui existe, dès lors qu’elle existe. [... ] La
    première présence est la présence de création. La seconde est la présence de
    dé-création,” Quoted from the French section of French-Italian volume Weil,
    Simone, L’ombra e la grazia, Milano: Bompiani, 2002, 68.


34. Ibid., 58.