Kénōsis
κένωσις (kenōsis)
Greek term derived from the verb *kenoō*, "to empty," "to make void." It refers to the voluntary self-emptying by which Christ, according to Paul’s hymn in Philippians, "emptied himself" (*heauton ekenōsen*) of his divine condition to take the form of a servant. Christian mysticism has made it the model of all dispossession: descending rather than ascending, relinquishing power rather than seizing it. Simone Weil adopts this gesture as her own—the human imitating God’s withdrawal.
Il s’est vidé de sa divinité. Nous devons nous vider de la fausse divinité avec laquelle nous sommes nés.
The hymn of the Epistle to the Philippians uses a brutal verb: Christ emptied himself, ekenōsen—not diminished, not veiled, but hollowed out of his divine form to embrace the condition of a slave. Kénōsis names this movement of descent: God, who could hold onto everything, lets go. The entire mysticism of dispossession flows from it—the soul imitates Christ only by consenting to shed what it prides itself on.
Simone Weil pushes this gesture to its sharpest edge. For her, creation itself is already a kénōsis: “God renounces—in a sense—being everything,” withdrawing so that there might be a world. Man retraces this path in reverse, but for a false treasure: “He emptied himself of his divinity. We must empty ourselves of the false divinity with which we are born.” Christ strips himself of the real; we, of an illusion—that of being the center. Material destitution, aktèmosynè, is only the visible fringe of this dispossession.
Kénōsis is not nihilistic annihilation. To empty oneself is not to destroy: Weil sharply distinguishes decreation, which moves the created toward more reality, from destruction, which hurls it into nothingness. The kenotic void is not a hole—it is an open space, waiting to be inhabited. Nor is kénōsis the same as Weil’s decreation: the latter is the term she forged for human effort, while kénōsis first names the act of God. One descends to save; the other fades to make room. The model precedes the copy.