Simone Weil

[Nihil Obstat]

St. Paul and essentially every holy pope in history seem to be ok with the occasional condemnation or anathema, so I think I am in good company.
Our society is spiritually slothful and decadent. I think we need a good dose of rigour and clear teaching.

We only condemn because we love. As I said and as I will continue to insist, I am only reacting harshly because I care about the salvation of souls and in giving due reverence to God. No other reason.

[Maggyie]

Yes I understand Nihil. I used to have the same beliefs and they were sincere - that the harsher I am, more souls will be saved and God will be more reverenced.

Eventually I came to realize that more souls are lost when they turn away from the harshness of Christians. In a culture where 1 out of 4 young people does not acknowledge that a god exists, let alone the God who is Jesus Christ, a full throated critique based on someone's status as baptized is shouting into the wind.

That doesn't concede the point, yes we all agree she should have been baptized. Nevertheless here was someone who

a. was unbaptized but who
b. thought about God and believed a relationship with him to be important and desirable.

I know plenty of people in category A, and their numbers are growing exponentially, can Simone teach us something about moving them to category B?

It's also the case that the harshest Christians are more often reverencing themselves and their "getting it right" when they tear into someone who "got it wrong."

[BarbTherese]

And I know people who refuse Catholicism and related baptism because of the harshness and moralizing, attitude of superiority and condemnation, of some religious and baptised people (as well as recent scandals).  They prefer to maintain a relationship with God outside of religion and remain outside of the problems within religion. We proclaim a God who is Love - but how do I proclaim Him?  These attitudes should be triggering one to ask oneself serious questions - like: Am I wrong somewhere? Is there a bridge between us? rather than to drive them further away by more harshness and moralising, condemnation with an air of superiority.

 

Sometimes condemnation of others is deep down an attempt to reinforce one's own sense of security and superiority on various levels. I have never forgotten that Thomas Merton wrote that the one thing we do not want to abandon at all costs is our sense of security  - and it just might be the one thing we need and are called to abandon.  This is not to state that we should abandon what we hold as right and true - rather, for one, to take a long hard look at how I might proclaim what is right and true.  Rather than abandoning all reserve, concern and compassion and in order to to proclaim where another may be wrong.  To have a look, a close look, at my own attitudes and where I just might be wrong.  Nor have I ever forgotten that one of the definitions of "sin" is "to miss the mark".  Catholic Exchange mentions 22 definitions of "sin" http://catholicexchange.com/22-biblical-words-for-sin-and-what-they-teach-us "This (miss the mark) reflects a common circumstance of sin: we have good intentions, we aim for virtue, but we still fail to reach it. As St. Paul wrote in Romans 7:15, For I do not that good which I will; but the evil which I hate."

 

Hope I said that to state what I mean!

_____________

Just as a PS re Thomas Merton. Later in his life, he did go 'off the beaten track' but as with all, to try to avoid 'chucking out the baby with the bathwater'.

[Nihil Obstat]

Yes I understand Nihil. I used to have the same beliefs and they were sincere - that the harsher I am, more souls will be saved and God will be more reverenced.

Eventually I came to realize that more souls are lost when they turn away from the harshness of Christians. In a culture where 1 out of 4 young people does not acknowledge that a god exists, let alone the God who is Jesus Christ, a full throated critique based on someone's status as baptized is shouting into the wind.

That doesn't concede the point, yes we all agree she should have been baptized. Nevertheless here was someone who

a. was unbaptized but who
b. thought about God and believed a relationship with him to be important and desirable.

I know plenty of people in category A, and their numbers are growing exponentially, can Simone teach us something about moving them to category B?

It's also the case that the harshest Christians are more often reverencing themselves and their "getting it right" when they tear into someone who "got it wrong."

I am seeing a lot of assumptions about my motivations and beliefs in this post, none of which I find to be very accurate.

[BarbTherese]

http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/1104798.htm

 

"The only danger the church can and should fear is the sin of her members," the pope (Benedict XVI) said."

[Kia ora]

Very much smells like Jansenism, a very dangerous heresy which denies the rightful place of the human will in cooperating with divine grace.

 

It might be that Weil was onto something and that she can teach us some things. But with philosophy it is often hard to seperate truth from untruth. One has to have a thorough knowledge of Catholic theology (and Greek philosophy!) to do that. Do you have such knowledge? If no, read the Church Fathers and Doctors first.

 

I might sound harsh, but we've seen legions of faithful fall into heresy because uncatholic ideas captured their heart.

 

Well funny you should mention that, since one of my favourite Christians is a Jansenist, Blaise Pascal. Some of my greatest theological and intellectual influences are those who have left the orbit of Christianity altogether or are at its borders. Pascal is one of them.

 

Christianity is a fides quarens intellectum. There's always more to learn. However, I would always prefer to grow in my faith before growing in my understanding. That is, my task is to nurture faith in God and to me that is far more important than understanding what this faith consists of. I'm always keen to learn more about theology and Greek philosophy, although my interests are far wider than just Catholic theology. I'm just as interested in the Eastern Orthodox as I am in the Lutherans, just as interested in the Catholics as in the Pentecostals.

[Kia ora]

I have a funny story about Weil.

 

Weil's brother was one of the greatest mathematicians who ever lived (André Weil), quite frankly a genius. They both went to the greatest educational institutions in the country. Simone passed the exams to enter the Ecole Normale Supérieure at the age of 19 with the highest grades. She left with an agrégation de philosophie, owed to the very best graduates, and was among the first women to graduate from there.

 

While studying at the Sorbonne, she met Simone de Beauvoir, who would become a great existentialist philosopher in her own right and the 'mother of feminism'.

 

She recounts the only meeting she ever had with Weil in her autobiography:

 

While Weil was preparing to enter the Normale, she was taking at the Sorbonne the same examinations as I was. She intrigued me, because of her reputation for intelligence and the strange way she dressed. She used to amble down the courtyard of the Sorbonne, escorted by a group of former students of Alain [nickname for Émile Chartier, professor and philosopher and teacher of Weil].

 

She'd aways keep a copy of a Libres Propos in one pocket of her coat, and in the other, a copy of L'Humanite [radical magazines]. A great famine had just struck China, and someone had told me that on learning of this news, she had burst into tears: those tears commanded my respect even more than her talents as a philosopher. I enived a heart like hers that could beat right across the entire world.

 

I managed one day to approach her. I don't know how the conversation got started: she declared sharply that only one thing on Earth was important today, the Revolution that would feed everyone in the world. I retorted, in an equally forceful manner, that the problem wasn't about making people happy, but about finding a meaning to their existence. She looked at me up and down: "It's clear that you've never been hungry." Our relationship stopped there. I understood that she had classified me as an 'high-minded little bourgeoise girl', and I got annoyed...I thought I had emancipated myself from my social class.

 

Simone de Beauvoir took second place in the exams, behind Weil.

 

 

Edited February 5, 2015 by Kia ora

[Kia ora]

de Beauvoir however continued to hear, indirectly, about Simone Weil, through a mutual friend of theirs, Colette Audry, a communist activist.

 

Colette Audry sometimes spoke of Simone Weil to me; and though I felt no great sympathy for her, this unknown woman's existence was forced upon my consciousness. She was a university teacher at Le Puy; it was said that she lived in a truck driver's hostel, and on the first of every month, would put her entire salary packet out on the table and let anyone help themselves. In order to act as leader of a strike delegation and present their claims, she herself had worked alongside the railwaymen. Conduct such as this got her into trouble with both the local mayor and with her pupil's parents, and she had very nearly been run out of the university. Her intelligence, her asceticism, her total commitment, and her sheer courage - all these filled me with admiration; though I knew that, had she met me, she would have been very far from reciprocating my attitude. I could not absorb her into my universe, and this seemed to constitute a vague threat to me.

 

 

In 1933, Simone Weil invites Leon Trotsky, his wife, child and bodyguards to stay at her parent's home. He has been exiled from Russia and is in danger of assassination (hence the bodyguards, who sleep in the corridor outside his new room). Trotsky has been forbidden to have political meetings in his own home by the French government, so he needs a place to do it elsewhere.

 

Weil had sympathies with Trotsky and the broader Marxist movement, and had talked to him through letters. She requests a personal meeting, the door closes and soon after, screaming can be heard. Trotsky is the one shouting and Weil is the quiet, calm one. She never raises her voice. Weil asks him why he gave the orders for the Kronstadt sailors to be fired upon. She is accusing him of having blood on his hands. Trotsky at one point replies: "If you think that way, why are you even having us! Are you the Salvation Army?". His wife, Nathalia Sedova, says to her parents: "This child of yours is standing up to Trotsky!".

 

As they leave, Trotsky says to her parents that they'll be able to say that it was in their house that the Fourth International was founded.

 

But unlike the great Bolshevist leaders, who never once stepped foot into a factory where the workers they so claimed to love worked, Weil did. Many Marxists didn't really seem to care about the suffering of the workers. Weil did.She didn't just work alongside them, becoming a worker herself, picking fruit in the fields and working from factory to factory, but she also worked - not just campaigned and marched with them, which she did, but worked - for them. Urbain Thévenon and his wife Albertine are trade union syndicalists, who start up a night school for blue collar workers in the industrial city of Saint Étienne. For the next year, Simone the professor of philosophy, wakes up at 4am on Saturday and Sunday and takes a three hour long train ride from Le Puy (where on the weekdays, she is working as a teacher for her young female students), in order to teach the miners and workers Latin and French and classical Greek literature.

 

This is a segment taken from the biography written by Francine du Plessix Gray, where Weil worked as a fisherman and by all accounts, did very well:

 

She vacationed with her parents in 1931 at the end of her last year at Normale. Dr and Madam Weil, sensing her emotional need for this kind of exertion went to Normandy ahead of her to help her join a fishing group. Most of the seamen were reluctant to take on an inexperienced woman. But one fisherman, Marcel Lecarpentier, owner of a four man boat, acceded to Dr Weil’s request. ” I decided to please Dr. Weil when I saw his daughter running along the shore like a mad woman,” he recalls, “She was going into the sea in her wide skirt, she was going soaking wet. I had already left shore but I turned around and went back and picked her up. I borrowed a set of oil skins to wrap her in.” She had a little book and a pencil with her. She spent a good part of the night drawing the constellations and writing. Lecarpentier eventually welcomed Simone into his house and became a friend and left a long recollection of her. “She wasn’t pretty and she would not take care of herself. She was a real ragamuffin. Her parents suffered from this and someone else in my village kept telling me, don”t have her into your house, she is a communist and will bring you trouble. I did not mind at all. She had a right to my table. Moreover she was not a communist, she taught my child catechism.” When the sea was too rough to go out, Simone helped Lecarpentier continue his own education in arithmetic and French literature, and went on tutoring him long after she went back to Paris. “For months to come, I would sent her my notebooks and she would correct them and sent them back to me,” Lecarpentier recalled. “And she continues sending me books, Gold Seekers of Alaska, for example. She wanted to know our misery, she wanted to free the worker, this was the goal of her life. I would say to her you are the daughter of rich people. She”d say, “That”s my misfortune, I wish my parents had been poor.” “You would not know so much, you wouldn’t have studied so much,” I would tell her. “No, no, you and I would have gotten to the same point,” she”d answer.

 

And in Palle Yourgrau's biography:

 

In her last few months on earth, withering away into a shadow in London while managing to write down thoughts that will amount to 800 printed pages, she never fails to correct the homework of her landlady’s children, the younger of whom will fall asleep waiting for her outside her door.

 

Someone who loves the poor, the children, the prostitutes and the oppressed (she was a firm opponent of French colonialism). Someone who always helps. What a heretic! I'd love to be a heretic like her, so filled with love.
 

[BarbTherese]

Amazing woman

[Catlick]

Well funny you should mention that, since one of my favourite Christians is a Jansenist, Blaise Pascal. Some of my greatest theological and intellectual influences are those who have left the orbit of Christianity altogether or are at its borders. Pascal is one of them.

 

Christianity is a fides quarens intellectum. There's always more to learn. However, I would always prefer to grow in my faith before growing in my understanding. That is, my task is to nurture faith in God and to me that is far more important than understanding what this faith consists of. I'm always keen to learn more about theology and Greek philosophy, although my interests are far wider than just Catholic theology. I'm just as interested in the Eastern Orthodox as I am in the Lutherans, just as interested in the Catholics as in the Pentecostals.

 

Jansenism was a cancer in the Church. It led to truly inhumane situations, for example in my hometown (in The Netherlands) a dying man was refused absolution three times despite confessing for three hours straight each time. The parish priest was convinced that the poor dying man's contrition was not perfect ergo he did not deserve absolution. 

 

Eventually Jansenism caused 1/3rd of the Dutch clergy to break with Rome. While Rome certainly made its mistakes in the handling of the situation, the apostate clerics (united in the 'Old-Catholic Church') made no serious attempts at returning to full communion. Preaching Calvinist predestination theory to illiterate farmers had priority over unity with the Holy Church. 

[Catlick]

Someone who loves the poor, the children, the prostitutes and the oppressed (she was a firm opponent of French colonialism). Someone who always helps. What a heretic! I'd love to be a heretic like her, so filled with love.

 

I've forgotten his name, but there's an early Church Father who explicitly states that heretics who die in government persecutions die for nothing, as they are not in unity with the One Church. 

 

By the way, you obviously haven't visited former colonial countries in Africa and Asia. There you'd see that nearly everything of lasting value (train stations, legal system, roads, etc.) was built by the colonial powers. And, for more important, colonialism brought the Faith to Africa and Asia. Without colonialism people there would still be doing human sacrifice. 

[Kia ora]

I recall something that Weil wrote, which I agree with:

 

The zeal of the missionaries has not Christianised Africa, Asia and Oceania. Instead it has brought these territories under the cold, cruel and destructive domination of the white race, who have smashed everything.

[Era Might]

I've forgotten his name, but there's an early Church Father who explicitly states that heretics who die in government persecutions die for nothing, as they are not in unity with the One Church. 

 

By the way, you obviously haven't visited former colonial countries in Africa and Asia. There you'd see that nearly everything of lasting value (train stations, legal system, roads, etc.) was built by the colonial powers. And, for more important, colonialism brought the Faith to Africa and Asia. Without colonialism people there would still be doing human sacrifice. 

 

Without human sacrifice, people would still be doing colonialism. The colonized mind is a slave mind. Two feet have lasting value, and once a man realizes he can walk on them, he has no need for master's train stations or laws.

Edited February 7, 2015 by Era Might

[Ice_nine]

By the way, you obviously haven't visited former colonial countries in Africa and Asia. There you'd see that nearly everything of lasting value (train stations, legal system, roads, etc.) was built by the colonial powers.

 

Dear Western World,

so hey thanks for setting up extractive institutions, enslaving us, widespread poverty and disease and dumping all of your trash in our backyard because train stations.

 

yours truly,

africa and the asian coutries such as

 

I almost can't believe somebody is trying to whitewash the evils of imperialism but it IS the internet after all.

Edited February 8, 2015 by Ice_nine

[Kia ora]

Jansenism was a cancer in the Church. It led to truly inhumane situations, for example in my hometown (in The Netherlands) a dying man was refused absolution three times despite confessing for three hours straight each time. The parish priest was convinced that the poor dying man's contrition was not perfect ergo he did not deserve absolution. 

 

Eventually Jansenism caused 1/3rd of the Dutch clergy to break with Rome. While Rome certainly made its mistakes in the handling of the situation, the apostate clerics (united in the 'Old-Catholic Church') made no serious attempts at returning to full communion. Preaching Calvinist predestination theory to illiterate farmers had priority over unity with the Holy Church. 

 

What I find amusing (in the kind of disgusted way) is that you find that, the refusal of absolution to a dying man, truly inhumane, whereas you are apologising shamelessly for colonialism.

 

Personally I find using Jesus to support slavery and theft blasphemous.