Simone Weil

[Kia ora]

Does anyone like her? I love her.

 

It's not enough to have teachings. One must have holy people who embody them. Simone Weil is one of those people for me. She is a holy person.

 

[bardegaulois]

Wow, it's been ages since I read Simone Weil. Thanks for bringing her name up. I know what book I'm trying to find in my too-large library tonight.

[Nihil Obstat]

The Wikipedia page I have just read about her indicates that, while she in general had some idea of the truth of the Catholic Church, she actually refused baptism. It would seem that she made that decision with full knowledge and deliberate consent, as she was clearly a very intelligent woman.

To make that choice is ludicrous and, quite frankly, presumptuous.

 

I am seeing that there are some rumours that she was baptized on her deathbed. I do hope that is the case. But I do not think her deliberate delaying (and possible rejection) of baptism is excusable. One cannot be Catholic and reject the necessity of baptism.

[Kia ora]

But she was not a Catholic. I am reading now what she wrote to her good friend and priest, Père Joseph-Marie Perrin (O.P). Here is my translation, done quick.

 

To finish up with my end, I say to myself this: The kind of inhibition that keeps me outside of the Church is owed either to a state of imperfection in which I find myself, or it's owed to my vocation and the will of God being opposed to it. In the first case, I can't remedy directly this inhibition, but only indirectly by becoming less imperfect, if grace helps me with this. To this effect, there only needs to be, on one hand, an effort made by myself to avoid errors in the domain of natural things, and on the other hand, to place ever more attention and love to the thought of God. If the will of God is that I enter the Church, it'll impose upon me this will at the exact moment when I deserve what it imposes on me.

 

In the second case, if His will is that I shouldn't enter the Church, how could I enter it? I know well what you've often told me, that is, baptism is the common route to salvation - at least in Christian countries - and that there's absolutely no reason that I should have an exceptional route. That's clear. But despite this, in the event that in fact it doesn't belong to me to walk this path, what could I do to walk it? If one could imagine that a person could beaver dam themselves by obeying God and that a person could save themself by disobeying Him, I would choose obedience.

 

It seems to me that the will of God is that I shouldn't enter the Church presently. As I've already said to you, and it's still true, the inhibition that holds me back doesn't make itself felt less strongly in my moments of attention, love and of prayer than in all the other moments of my life. However I've felt a very great joy in hearing you say that my thoughts, such as I've exposed to you, aren't incompatible with belonging to the Church, and that consequently, I'm not a stranger to her in spirit.

I can't help but continue asking myself if, in these times where such a large chunk of humanity is sinking under materialism, God does not wish that there are men and women who are given to Him and to Christ, but who remain outside of the Church.

 

Anyway, when I picture it (baptism) concretely and as a thing which could be the next act by which I'd enter the Church, no thought gives me more pain than that of separating myself from the vast and unhappy mass of unbelievers. I have the essential need, and I think I can say the vocation, to move among people and all the human places, mixing myself with them, taking the same colour as them, in every way at least that isn't objectionable to conscience, disappearing amongst them; and all this so that they might show themselves as they are, without disguising themselves for me. Because I long to know them, so that I may love them as they are. For if I don't love them as they are, it's not them who I love, and my love is not true.

 

...

[The vocation], which is to stay anonymous in a way, ready to mix at any moment with the paste of common humanity.

 

...

 

I owe you the truth, at the risk of hurting you, and although it would be extremely painful for me to hurt you. I love God, Christ and the Catholic faith, as much as it belongs to such a being as miserably inadequate of love for them. I love the saints through their writings and all their stories about their live - apart from some, whom I find impossible to love fully or even to regard as saints. I love six or seven Catholics who are of an authentic spirituality that chance has let me meet throughout my life. I love the liturgy, the singing, the architecture, the rituals and the Catholic ceremonies. But I have no love for the Church, properly said, to any extent, outside of its relation to all those things that I love. I'm able to sympathise with those who have this love, but I don't feel it. I know well that all the saints felt it. But they were almost all of them born and raised in the Church. Be that as it may, love is not given by one's own will. All that I can say is that if this love constitutes a condition for spiritual progress, a love that I don't know, or if it belongs to my vocation, then I long for it to be given to me one day.

 

 

Edited February 3, 2015 by Kia ora

[Nihil Obstat]

Apparently she was not even Christian. The necessity of baptism is just foundational.

[Kia ora]

Ah what an age, when an unbaptised person devoted her life to the love of God and the love of man and is called not even a Christian, and when entire nations of baptised people devote their lives to war, greed and hate-mongering and deserve the beautiful name of Christian.

 

In any case, she felt more commonalities with the unbaptised and the unsaved than the 'saved'. She belonged outside of the Church.

Edited February 3, 2015 by Kia ora

[Nihil Obstat]

You do not get to throw out one of the most basic, foundational requirements of the Faith. No matter how holy you are trying to be. Baptism is absolutely necessary.

[Nihil Obstat]

It is very unfortunate... but that is something you cannot get around or explain away. You. Cannot. Reject. Baptism.

[veritasluxmea]

I'm glad she lived a good life. Sad she rejected baptism. She sounds like a very talented and interesting person. She seemed to live a more "me and God only" spiritual life, which is sad, for I've only found Christ fully in his bride, the Church. Good grief, don't mistake knowing the necessity of baptism in her life as saying she's Hitler or something.

[Catlick]

I read Weil's The Need for Roots a few years ago. If I recall correctly the book was written a few years either before or after World War II. It made a diagnosis of the contemporary crisis and suggested some solutions, both spiritual and practical. Her spiritual recommendations showed a serious engagement with tradition (Jerusalem, Athens, Rome) but also eclectic views (i.e. dismissing views held by Greek philosophers and Catholic theologians for over two thousand years, without proper argumentation). I particularly remember being dumbfounded at her radical rejection of anything Jewish/Judaic from the Western tradition.

 

Her practical recommendations were... Impractical, so to say. She had quite utopian ideas about redistributing property (from the industrialists to the labourers), ideas only implementable by a high degree of government intervention and a serious violation of property rights. My impression was that she lacked the common sense to know that good ideas don't necessarily make good policies.

[Era Might]

My impression was that she lacked the common sense to know that good ideas don't necessarily make good policies.

 

Those are the people who make the most interesting lives. Nobody admires Joan of Arc for her common sense; same with Simone Weil. Not too many chartered accountants do much worth remembering.

 

Here's a good and critical article of Weil by the poet Kenneth Rexroth:

 

What was wrong with Simone Weil? Our grandparents used to say of learned girls who broke down, “She studied too hard. She read too many books.” And today we laugh at them. I think Simone Weil had both over- and under-equipped herself for the crisis which overwhelmed her — along, we forget, immersed in her tragedy, with all the rest of us. She was almost the perfectly typical passionate, revolutionary, intellectual woman — a frailer, even more highly strung Rosa Luxemburg.

 

...

 

Only such advice could have saved her. Only the realization of the truth — so hard to come by for the religious adventurer — that no one is “called” to be any holier than he absolutely has to be, could have given her real illumination. To anything like this she was defiantly impervious. She went to John of the Cross when she should have gone to plain Fr. Dupont, or Fr. Monahan, or Fr. Aliotto. Even Huysmans, with all his posturing, had sense enough to make St. Severin, that humble slum church, his home parish. Simone Weil assaulted the Garden of Gethsemane, and as is so often the case, was broken on the gate.

 

At least she speaks, again and again, of her absolutely sure sense of the suddenly descending, all-suffusing presence of God. So we know that somewhere, somehow, in all her agony, she did find some center of peace, a peace which, unless we happen to believe in God, we may find hard to explain.

 

http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/essays/simone-weil.htm

Edited February 3, 2015 by Era Might

[Era Might]

By the way, Weil's essay on The Iliad is an excellent meditation on the nature of violence:

 

"Iliad, or the Poem of Force":

 

 

http://biblio3.url.edu.gt/SinParedes/08/Weil-Poem-LM.pdf

Edited February 3, 2015 by Era Might

[CrossCuT]

I dont know who she is but I have always loved the name Simone!

[marigold]

Those are the people who make the most interesting lives. Nobody admires Joan of Arc for her common sense; same with Simone Weil. Not too many chartered accountants do much worth remembering.

 

Here's a good and critical article of Weil by the poet Kenneth Rexroth:

 

That's a lovely quote, and makes a good point.

 

(What I'd understood about the baptism thing was that she decided she preferred to have solidarity with the unbaptised; she didn't want to be separated from anyone or anything by anyone or anything. How she saw it, anyway.)

[BarbTherese]

That's a lovely quote, and makes a good point.

 

(What I'd understood about the baptism thing was that she decided she preferred to have solidarity with the unbaptised; she didn't want to be separated from anyone or anything by anyone or anything. How she saw it, anyway.)

 

Simone would have had solidarity with the unbaptised, but not with the baptised and so would have been separated from those baptised - and not in solidarity with all.

 

I have the essential need, and I think I can say the vocation, to move among people and all the human places, mixing myself with them, taking the same colour as them, in every way at least that isn't objectionable to conscience, disappearing amongst them; and all this so that they might show themselves as they are, without disguising themselves for me. Because I long to know them, so that I may love them as they are. For if I don't love them as they are, it's not them who I love, and my love is not true.

 

 

It is quite possible.  It is even a command of the Gospel, as I see it, to effect the above.

Edited February 3, 2015 by BarbaraTherese