Outside of Scripture, the Christian tradition speaks of affliction broadly, but perhaps none speaks so clearly in the contemporary era as Simone Weil, the 20th century French philosopher and mystic, who gives the following insightful description of affliction:
“In the realm of suffering, affliction is something apart, specific and irreducible…it takes possession of the soul and marks it… Affliction is an uprooting of life, a more or less attenuated equivalent of death…. Affliction makes God appear to be absent for a time. … What is terrible is that if, in this darkness where there is nothing to love, the soul ceases to love, God’s absence becomes final. … If the soul stops loving it falls, even in this life, into something almost equivalent to hell. That is why those who plunge men into affliction before they are prepared to receive it kill their souls. … Help given to souls is effective only if it goes far enough really to prepare them for affliction. That is no small thing.” (Waiting for God; New York : Harper & Row, 1951 | pp. 117, 120-121).
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