Simone Weil: Atheist to Christian

Nick_A · July 30, 2005, 6:42pm

Hello All

I have a great admiration for true religious individuality. Where many find it comforting to talk of the unity of humanity in idealistic terms, I admire those that have experienced the human condition for what it is in themselves as well as society and personally grown as a result in the direction of the true human spirit.

Simone Weil was, I believe, such a person. She was such an individual that she really is impossible to classify. She is one of those few that can only be called an “event”.

It almost seems absurd that a woman born in 1909 and dies in 1943, living a brief 34 years, should now become for me not only one of the most profound female thinkers I’ve read but one of the most dedicated to be brutally honest with her beliefs in relation to herself. I’ve read some of her writings and will gradually read more but I am in awe that such depth, courage, and sincerity could exist in someone so young.

Needless to say, attempting to deal with what was obvious an inner calling annoyed many. She was very “odd.” and probably even frightened some. It was part of a growing process in a world alien to her being.

Talk about individuality. She was born a French Jew in a fairly well to do home and her parents were fond of Marx and Freud. When very young she was a brilliant anarchist and Atheist and Marxist… But not just a talker, she lived her principles and voluntarily entered factory work to experience the human condition.

Her life was so odd but completely genuine that Albert Camus called her â€œthe only great spirit of our time."

From “Simone Weil: A Saint for our Time”:

According to Francine du Plessix Gray in a recent biography of Weil,[1] Pope Paul VI claimed her as one of the threeâ€”with Pascal and Bernanosâ€”most important influences on his intellectual development. It may be that the only reason she is not and is never likely to be Saint Simone is that she was never baptized. She refused baptism a number of times, the last as she lay dying. She regarded herself, however, as a true Christian, too true, by her own understanding, to become a member of the Catholic Church (the only existing church to which she felt drawn). She felt she could be â€œfaithful to Christâ€ without being a member of the Church; perhaps even more so because she was outside it. â€œA few sheep should remain outside the fold to bear witness that the love of Christ is essentially something different.â€

It was her incredible talent and her uncompromising desire to be real that allowed I believe a genuine transition in human psychological growth where she could understand the natural connection between the attractions of Christianity and Atheism. Now who but a true individual could grasp and reconcile such an apparent contradiction?

She experienced, I believe, something similar to what St. Paul did when she writes “Christ himself came down and took possession of me.” It is notable that she writes: " God in his mercy had prevented me from reading the mystics, so that it should be evident to me that I had not invented this absolutely unexpected contact." It minimizes the role of imagination. Since she wrote this to a friend knowing she was near death, I don’t suspect the usual urge to try and create appearance. Anyhow, before getting into her conception of the connection between Atheism and Christianity, I’ll first copy this excerpt from her book

WAITING FOR GOD by Simone Weil - Harper & Row, New York, 1951, translated by Emma Craufurd (title is also translated as “Waiting ON God”)

There was a young English Catholic there from whom I gained my first idea of the supernatural power of the sacraments because of the truly angelic radiance with which he seemed to be clothed after going to communion. Chance – for I always prefer saying chance rather than Providence – made of him a messenger to me. For he told me of the existence of those English poets of the seventeenth century who are named metaphysical. In reading them later on, I discovered the poem of which I read you what is unfortunately a very inadequate translation. It is called “Love”. I learned it by heart. Often, at the culminating point of a violent headache, I make myself say it over, concentrating all my attention upon it and clinging with all my soul to the tenderness it enshrines. I used to think I was merely reciting it as a beautiful poem, but without my knowing it the recitation had the virtue of a prayer. It was during one of these recitations that, as I told you, Christ himself came down and took possession of me.

In my arguments about the insolubility of the problem of God I had never foreseen the possibility of that, of a real contact, person to person, here below, between a human being and God I had vaguely heard tell of things of this kind, but I had never believed in them. In the Fioretti the accounts of apparitions rather put me off if anything, like the miracles in the Gospel. Moreover, in this sudden possession of me by Christ, neither my senses nor my imagination had any part; I only felt in the midst of my suffering the presence of a love, like that which one can read in the smile on a beloved face.

I had never read any mystical works because I had never felt any call to read them. In reading as in other things I have always striven to practice obedience. There is nothing more favorable to intellectual progress, for as far as possible I only read what I am hungry for at the moment when I have an appetite for it, and then I do not read, I eat. God in his mercy had prevented me from reading the mystics, so that it should be evident to me that I had not invented this absolutely unexpected contact.

Yet I still half refused, not my love but my intelligence. For it seemed to me certain, and I still think so today, that one can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truth. Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.

After this I came to feel that Plato was a mystic, that all the Iliad is bathed in Christian light, and that Dionysus and Osiris are in a certain sense Christ himself; and my love was thereby redoubled.

I never wondered whether Jesus was or was not the Incarnation of God; but in fact I was incapable of thinking of him without thinking of him as God.

In the spring of 1940 I read the Bhagavad-Gita. Strange to say it was in reading those marvelous words, words with such a Christian sound, put into the mouth of an incarnation of God, that I came to feel strongly that we owe an allegiance to religious truth which is quite different from the admiration we accord to a beautiful poem; it is something far more categorical.

During all this time of spiritual progress I had never prayed. I was afraid of the power of suggestion that is in prayer – the very power for which Pascal recommends it. Pascal’s method seems to me one of the worst for attaining faith.

Contact with you was not able to persuade me to pray. On the contrary I thought the danger was all the greater, since I also had to beware of the power of suggestion in my friendship with you. At the same time I found it very difficult not to pray and not to tell you so. Moreover I knew I could not tell you without completely misleading you about myself. At that time I should not have been able to make you understand.

Until last September I had never once prayed in all my life, at least not in the literal sense of the word. I had never said any words to God, either out loud or mentally. I had never pronounced a liturgical prayer. I had occasionally recited the Salve Regina, but only as a beautiful poem.

Last summer, doing Greek with T-, I went through the Our Father word for word in Greek. We promised each other to learn it by heart. I do not think he ever did so, but some weeks later, as I was turning over the pages of the Gospel, I said to myself that since I had promised to do this thing and it was good, I ought to do it. I did it. The infinite sweetness of this Greek text so took hold of me that for several days I could not stop myself from saying it over all the time. A week afterward I began the vine harvest I recited the Our Father in Greek every day before work, and I repeated it very often in the vineyard.

Since that time I have made a practice of saying it through once each morning with absolute attention. If during the recitation my attention wanders or goes to sleep, in the minutest degree, I begin again until I have once succeeded in going through it with absolutely pure attention. Sometimes it comes about that I say it again out of sheer pleasure, but I only do it if I really feel the impulse.

The effect of this practice is extraordinary and surprises me every time, for, although I experience it each day, it exceeds my expectation at each repetition.

At times the very first words tear my thoughts from my body and transport it to a place outside space where there is neither perspective nor point of view. The infinity of the ordinary expanses of perception is replaced by an infinity to the second or sometimes the third degree. At the same time, filling every part of this infinity of infinity, there is silence, a silence which is not an absence of sound but which is the object of a positive sensation, more positive than that of sound. Noises, if there are any, only reach me after crossing this silence.

Sometimes, also, during this recitation or at other moments, Christ is present with me in person, but his presence is infinitely more real, more moving, more clear than on that first occasion when he took possession of me.

I should never have been able to take it upon myself to tell you all this had it not been for the fact that I am going away. And as I am going more or less with the idea of probable death, I do not believe that I have the right to keep it to myself. For after all, the whole of this matter is not a question concerning me myself. It concerns God. I am really nothing in it all. If one could imagine any possibility of error in God, I should think that it had all happened to me by mistake. But perhaps God likes to use castaway objects, waste, rejects. After all, should the bread of the host be moldy, it would become the Body of Christ just the same after the priest had consecrated it. Only it cannot refuse, while we can disobey. It sometimes seems to me that when I am treated in so merciful a way, every sin on my part must be a mortal sin. And I am constantly committing them…

No cutsey pooh everybody loves everybody stuff. Just profound experience of one searching with courage for meaning in a world hostile to their efforts.

So how does she unite Atheism and Christianity? She does so with a realistic appreciation of the divided state of human nature without any condemnation. She had experienced both with pure intent so her connection was natural. Consider these two quotations:

How can such a young person see what so many have missed? Religion isn’t for consolation but awakening which the Atheist in their own way invites us to do. Both Atheists and the Religious will dig their heels in and snarl at one another while she only relates her experience of reconciliation. At one time in her life her concern was purely for the society and as Atheistic as one could be. But her courage and desire for the truth itself required her to be open and not just close off in defense of an agenda. In this way she could experience what I believe to be the natural transition into higher understanding that our arguments and egotistic self justifications close us off to. Her individualism demanded being open to reality at the expense of her beliefs.

Simone, I know you had no interest whatsoever in personal appearance but I will say that you are one of the most beautiful women I have ever come to be aware of. A true individual with the need to be real.

Jerry · July 30, 2005, 8:31pm

Thanks, Nick. I’ve just added “Waiting for God” to my reading list.

Nick_A · July 31, 2005, 5:16am

Jerry

I hope you enjoy it. It is good also I believe, for some of the talented female students in philosophy and religious ideas to know of her since her ideas can be woven into many papers much to the delight of so many professors that read the same stuff over and over.

Her “Gravity and Grace” is another classic. Here are just two of so many ideas for papers. First:

“Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it We must continually suspend the work of the imagination in filling the void within ourselves.”
“In no matter what circumstances, if the imagination is stopped from pouring itself out, we have a void (the poor in spirit). In no matter what circumstances… imagination can fill the void. This is why the average human beings can become prisoners, slaves, prostitutes, and pass thru no matter what suffering without being purified.”

“That is why we fly from the inner void, since God might steal into it. It is not the pursuit of pleasure and the aversion for effort which causes sin, but fear of God. We know that we cannot see him face to face without dying, and we do not want to die.”
– Gravity and Grace

Compare with Meister Eckhart and remember she didn’t read the mystics:

They are both speaking of the effects of imagination on the growth of our being. Her idea that that the "sight"of God would mean our death refers to the death of our imagination and this perception of self ties in with the strange statement in Genesis 2:

Now a bright student can explain all this in terms of Man’s evolution being temporarily halted by cosmic necessity and so many take this idea of death wrongly.

Then a student could write on the relative attractions of good and evil in society as being indicative of man asleep to reality.

“Monotony of evil: never anything new, everything about it is equivalent. Never anything real, everything about it is imaginary. It is because of this monotony that quantity plays so great a part. A host of women (Don Juan) or of men (Celimene) etc. One is condemned to false infinity. That is hell itself.”
– Gravity and Grace

Nothing is so beautiful and wonderful, nothing is so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy, as the good. No desert is so dreary, monotonous, and boring as evil. This is the truth about authentic good and evil. With fictional good and evil it is the other way round. Fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied and intriguing, attractive, profound, and full of charm

Simone Weil from Morality and Literature

So she opens the question of the nature of the good and evil and if we are really open to it. Perhaps our conception of the good is in reality just an interpretation from our ignorance of evil making it boring. Many have become so closed that they cannot experience what she became aware of so without the artificial stimulation, life must be boring.

In the days of recycling papers, how many professors would ever read a paper developing such ideas?

During this modern phase where individuality is frowned on in favor of PC thought, we are truly fortunate to have had those like Simone Weil to encourage these up and coming “black sheep” that will gravitate towards common sense and on what they produce, so much of the quality of our future will depend.

Nick_A · August 2, 2005, 6:25pm

We’ve been discussing the idea of peace amongst religions which naturally must include believer and non-believer. I don’t believe this is possible if for no other reasons that the collective level of being would not allow it. The hope for easing the tension rests with the minority that have grown to understand the absurdity of the human condition beyond lip service and their inspiration for others. The reality of this observation is vivified once one has acquired the religious perspective that Simone Weil refers to.

First, I want to make it absolutely clear that she is no Suzie Whatserface that read three books on philosophy and decided to teach everyone about true love. Not the case. From hermitary.com/house/weil.html

Perhaps the outstanding woman philosopher of the twentieth-century was Simone Weil (1909-1943), praised by thinkers of such diverse opinion as Andre Gide, Albert Camus, and T. S. Eliot. To Gide, Weil was the “most spiritual writer of this century”; to Camus, “the only great spirit of our times.” Eliot called her “a woman of genius, of a kind of genius akin to that of a saint.” The critic Leslie Fiedler described her as “the Outsider as Saint in an age of alienation.”

Simone Weil was a teacher, scholar, thinker, writer, laborer, and ultimately mystic. This brilliant combination of a spectra of interests and a depth of analysis from political and social insight to pure philosophy to a deep and sensitive spirituality makes Weil the genius spirit that is the consensus of all observers.

Her special contribution may also be her trenchant thoughts on society and solitude. Weil’s succinct view of society — that “the social order, though necessary, is essentially evil, whatever it may be” – sets the tone of not only her political and sociological thinking but also the direction of her thought toward solitude.

She’s been celebrated by both Marxists and a Pope. Such a person can not be all bad.

It has been her intellectual brilliance, openness and sensitivity to human suffering, and the passion for truth as opposed to platitudes that has allowed her IMO to really come to grips with levels of reality.

Now what kind of nonsense is this from a woman of such celebrated intellectual brilliance? Submit to what? What could be more important than believing yourself right or wrong? To attention itself.

acmsonline.org/Taylor-SimoneWeil.pdf

Because mathematics gives us the sense that it comes from beyond us, it is beautiful. We are aware that it is not our own creation but is the image of something eternal. Beauty always causes us to recognize that we are finite, limited beings. Just as when we see a beautiful work of art, we wish only to gaze endlessly it, so a beautiful piece of mathematics causes us to contemplate it intensely. Beauty awakes in the viewer the opposite response from affliction. Just as the response to affliction is derision and anger, the response to beauty is joy. In the midst of thoughts jotted in her notebooks is this comment: "Joy â€¦ is the feeling of reality. Beauty is the manifest presence of reality."20

For Weil, all reality is transcendent. We may occasionally experience beauty, or reality, in nature or elsewhere. On the whole, though, we are separated from true reality. Our lives mostly consist of affliction and pain. Our experience of beauty, our experience of reality, is thus a contradiction. We must treasure and rejoice in the rare moments when we experience beauty. Since beauty, which is reality, is to be treasured, Weil gives science a privileged place when she writes, "The object of science is the exploration of beauty a priori."21

“Doing mathematics” is not, however, for most people an experience of beauty. Simone, having grown up in AndrÃ©â€™s intellectual shadow, is well aware of this. In fact, most of her references to mathematics deal with the value of mathematics for those who are not inclined to it. In her notebooks she writes, "Mathematics alone make us feel the limits of our intelligence."22 Her essay “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies toward the Love of God” is entirely devoted to this topic. For Weil, the main goal of schoolwork is to develop oneâ€™s concentration so that it is possible to pray more fervently and attentively. She even says that considered this way, all school subjects have equal merit: they can all develop the "faculty of attention which, directed toward God, is the very substance of prayer"23. Rather than desiring subjects that we find easy, we should seek out those with which we have difficulty. She provides an example from mathematics:

"If we have no aptitude or natural taste for geometry, this does not mean that ourfaculty for attention will not be developed by wrestling with a problem or studying a theorem. On the contrary it is almost an advantage. "It does not matter much whether we succeed in finding the solution or understandingthe proof, although it is important to try really hard to do so. Never in any case [is] a genuine effort of the attention wasted. It always has its effect on the spiritual plane and in consequence on the lower one of the intelligence, for all spiritual light lightens the mind."24

Weil, thus, both privileges and denigrates the role of mathematics. On the one hand, it is a means for experiencing beauty and true reality, on the other it is just one subject among many through which we can attempt to master our concentration. This attitude develops humility. "Above all it is thus that we can acquire the virtue of humility, and that is a far more precious treasure than all academic progressâ€¦ [T]here is no doubt that school studies are quite as good a road to sanctity as any other."25 But seeing mathematics as one road among many does not diminish the value of the subject in and of itself. A bit later in the essay, she writes, "The solution of a geometry problem does not in itself constitute a precious gift, but the same law applies to it because it is the image of something precious. Being a little fragment of a particular truth, it is a pure image of the unique, eternal, and living Truth, the very Truth that once in a human voice declared: â€˜I am the Truthâ€™. Every school exercise, thought of in this way, is like a sacrament."26

Being that secular religion exists on the same level as cultural life it functions with the same relative quality of attention, lack of self awareness, that allows “meaning” to be established and accepted on such superficial levels.

cesnur.org/2002/slc/bauer.htm

Viewed as a whole, Simone Weil’s religious thought is structured by the tensional relationship between obedience and criticism. Thus, while stressing that “la crucifixion du Christ est le modÃ¨le de tous les actes dÂ´obÃ©issance”[57] [the crucifixion of Christ is the model of all acts of obedience], she underscored throughout her writings the need for the mind to exert its critical capacities wherever the issue of power is at stake. From this perspective, the free assumption of the obedient condition of a slave is the sine qua non for fully deploying the critical might of intelligence against oppression. Since such a critical slave obeys, but not with his intelligence, Simone Weil never compromised her probity by submitting her intellect to ecclesiastical authority. While Francis of Assisi and other great saints of the Christian tradition surrendered their minds, wills and actions to the power of the Church, Simone Weil was not prepared to assume her enslaved condition within an ecclesiastical setting of hierarchical obedience, but only in the alienating world of ordinary life. Not having submitted her intellect to a Church that she considered to be at the origin of the present-day “malaise de lÂ´intelligence”[58] [uneasiness of the intelligence], Simone Weil was free to expose the religious power structures that pervert the redemptive movement of kenosis. Against this background, her dictum “la Croix seule me suffit”[59] [the Cross alone is enough for me] is indicative of her willingness to assume the kenotic condition in order to unmask the Church’s idolatrous transformation of the cross into a symbol of theo-political power. Hence, it was not hubris or the “sin of pride” – a favourite topos of her Catholic commentators – that prompted her to remain outside the Roman Church. Rather, the decision was a strict consequence of her kenotic religiosity informed by the gift of her relentlessly anti-idolatrous intelligence.

The human condition is not the result of thought itself but the loss of the perspective from imagination gradually replacing conscious attention where thought loses context.

The kenotic and critical use of the mind remits to God’s self-annihilation as manifested in the abasement of the “MÃ©diateur” [mediator], the term Simone Weil uses to translate and interpret the Johannine Logos. This Mediator neither transfers nor transmits divine power, but rather discloses the metaphysical emptiness of power that results from God’s finitization. Being devoid of power, the Mediator is a slave who embodies the human point of non-activity where pure attentiveness faces evil and overcomes it by the sole means of its full recognition. Since “la puretÃ© est le pouvoir de contempler la souillure”[60] [purity is the power to contemplate defilement], only the attentive contemplation of evil is redemptive and elicits the essential content of universal religion. On these assumptions, Simone Weil rejects the idolatrous hypostatizing of historical contingencies that has led to the dogmatic self-understanding of Christianity and to its exclusion policy as expressed in the ecclesiastical anathema sit.[61] Given that only the religion of pervasive kenosis can be truly universal, no single historical individual can exhaust its fullness by virtue of his redemptive acts, and no religious institution can grasp and articulate its meaning by means of dogmatic or doctrinal teachings. In the last resort, it is in the name of religious universalism that Simone Weil calls for a reversion of historical Christianity to its origins as a religion of kenosis.

For me, this means that by maintaining the impartial conscious attention and experiencing life as it is and without sugar coating or denying allows one to gradually follow God’s withdrawal allowing man to follow.

Simone Weil’s primary concern with the existential common ground of religion and the universal perspective of redemption, has led her numerous critics and detractors to accuse her of syncretism and eclecticism, and, consequently, of being incapable of assessing the uniqueness of the Christian message. Typically, one of such critics decries her as a “demi-Christian mystic” whose religion was a “syncretist melange of Gnosticism, Christianity, Hinduism and Greek speculation.”[62] This sort of criticism bluntly overlooks the fact that Simone Weil, while acknowledging the fundamental differences between historical religions, undertook the eminently philosophical task of determining the quintessential core where historical religions converge, and claimed that this core constituted the criterion for judging how religions have deployed their redemptive messages throughout history. Having disclosed the kenotic thrust of religion as its essence, Simone Weil was able not only to explore the grounds common to atheistic and theistic religions, but also to re-assess the religious relevance of the atheism that underlies Western secularism. Far from being disquieted by atheism, she contended that to repeat to oneself the idea “que (Dieu) nÂ´existe pas”[63] [that God does not exist] constitutes a method of religious purification. Such an idea is of course not just an hypothetical assumption designed to support spiritual asceticism, but corresponds to Simone Weil’s fundamental premise that God’s kenosis entails the de-realization of His existence. Ultimately, the kenotic insight resumed in her assertion that “la Croix seule me suffit” [the Cross alone is enough for me], attains its full deployment in the a-theological dimension resulting from God’s self-finitization.[64]

This, IMO, is the essence of Christian “re-birth” so as to become an aspect of God’s will. The common ground with all religion at its essence is to see ourselves in the context of our potential. Instead of arguing over who is right or wrong, the intelligent beginning is that we are all nothing in relation to our potential. The unifying factor regarding religion is not in determining some imaginary wonderfulness of man but we are united in our nothingness.

In unyielding opposition to the authoritarian pretensions of a Church that demands intellectual surrender to its dogmas and regards itself as the “patrie terrestre”[65] [earthly fatherland] of its members, Simone Weil’s kenotic thought leads up to an a-theology of exile that copes with the paradox of becoming rooted in God’s absence.[66] Refusing to acquiesce in the spiritual comforts that the traditions of Judaism and Christianity claim to offer, Simone Weil stresses the need for a form of saintliness without precedent in history. The “saintetÃ© nouvelle”[67] [new saintliness] she envisaged assumes that the search for redemptive truth can only take place on the basis of complete freedom of thought, and dismisses the ideal of a sacrificium intellectus on the altars of organized religion as perhaps the most fundamental perversion in the long history of the Church. If one bears in mind the scope and import of Simone Weil’s contentions, it is hardly surprising that, in her view, the needed new saintliness presupposes a greater geniality than that of Archimedes.[68] Tellingly, her a-theological demarche toward the redemptive universality of kenosis could be paralleled at most with Franz Kafka’s strategy of overcoming power by taking refuge in what he called “das Kleine” [the small].[69] In a brief passage that Elias Canetti[70] considers akin to a Taoist text, Franz Kafka explains what “small” meant to him:

Thought acquires meaning by becoming part of a human perspective in which thought plays its part as opposed to being denied. Attention is the key factor that retains the separation between reality and the attraction of imagination.

Bob · August 2, 2005, 7:11pm

Hi Nick,

Thank you for bringing Simone Weil to our attention. I have admired what I knew about her for some time, since a teacher of mine gave me one of her books. What you have quoted has re-established my admiration. I have often asked myself, how someone so prolific and yet who died so young found time at all to live and experience so intensely the things she did.

Just a hint though, the more you quote wonâ€™t make it more interesting.

It isnâ€™t unusual for someone to be â€œtaken possession ofâ€ when they have been moved in the way that Simone had been moved. It can happen in deep sadness, in ecstatic happiness, in the realisation of an overwhelming love, or anything that manages to free us of our occupation with everyday things. It can also happen when we find seclusion, our â€œinner chamberâ€, on a mountain or in a valley. It is then that we feel a presence that calls us by our name, and says, â€œYou are mineâ€.

The circumstances of Simones being divinely possessed were suited to her own intellectual status, as is the descent on anyone. Whether the simpleton or the professor, â€œGodâ€ speaks to us all in the way suited to us. I have heard the voice in many ways, in a storm on the Irish Sea, in the middle of a sermon, alone with a Bible in my hands, in the middle of a busy street, as well as when listening to St. Francisâ€™ Prayer for peace being sung. Many different occasions, many different circumstances, multiplied by the number of human beings there are and you have the true diversity of the divine.

Simon writes, â€œOne can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truthâ€. I think that this readiness to â€œwrestleâ€ is what is particular about spiritual people. It isnâ€™t just acceptance of truth, but the struggle that changes a life. Figuratively, it is the wrenched socket of Jacob that we are all left with. A mark of being touched and possessed by the Ineffable isnâ€™t always attractive, and can even ward off people. But if it is taken seriously, it leads to character and life.

â€œAfter this I came to feel that Plato was a mystic, that all the Iliad is bathed in Christian light, and that Dionysus and Osiris are in a certain sense Christ himself; and my love was thereby redoubled.â€ Simone was at home in the Greek Classics and identified her love through them. So we all use the language that we identify with, just as I too see God at work in all areas of mysticism, using the Prophets, the Rabbis, the Sufis, the Sages, the Mahatmas, and whatever title you want to give them, to speak to a devastated world.

The two quotes you mentioned remind me of something I said a while back, but which gained no attention.

“Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith: in this sense, atheism is purification. I have to be atheistic with the part of myself which is not made for God. Among those men in whom the supernatural part has not been awakened, the atheists are right and the believers wrong.”
“An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God.”

In Germany, a protestant theologian named Dorothee SÃ¶lle became infamous for coining the phrase, â€œto have an atheistic faith in God.â€ She found the kind of attention that many mystics in the course of church history have often received, and lived finally in America, where she died not to long ago. Perhaps she had been moved by Simone Weil, it wouldnâ€™t surprise me.

Perhaps the Atheist isnâ€™t as jumbled up as many Christians are, and they donâ€™t feel obliged to excuse a history that accuses organised piety of killing its spiritual leaders. Our church history is full of shame, and there is no excuse. I just canâ€™t separate myself from it because Iâ€™m no better. Israel has its shame written in the Tanakh, Christianity hides behind apologetics. I find Israelâ€™s method better.

There are many reasons for not becoming a Christian, just as the other forms of organised piety have their weaknesses. We just have to differentiate between the spirituality and the piety that is a result of being â€œpossessedâ€ by the ineffable. Perhaps Simone would have experienced this if she hadnâ€™t contracted Tuberculosis â€“ as it is, she died a Saint.

Shalom

Nick_A · August 3, 2005, 12:17am

Hi Bob

In all fairness most experience some degree of the experience of something higher than themselves but this shouldn’t be equated with the awakening experience of St. Paul and to a lesser degree, Simone Weil. That experience of help from direct contact must come from being “noticed” for one reason or another.

She had this thought provoking conception of creation that is similar to what I know from my understanding of esoteric Christianity.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_Weil#Absence

Absence is the key image for her metaphysics, cosmology, cosmogeny, and theodicy. She believed that God created by an act of self-delimitation–in other words, because God is conceived as a kind of utter fullness, a perfect being, no creature could exist except where he was not. Thus creation occurred only when God withdrew a part of himself.

This is, for Weil, an original kenosis preceding the corrective kenosis of Christ’s incarnation. (One might compare this with Christologies like that of Athanasius, which emphasize the incarnation as a natural extension of creation rather than as a break from the original created order.) We are thus born in a sort of damned position not owing to original sin as such, but because to be created at all we had to be precisely what God is not, i.e., we had to be the opposite of what is holy.

This notion of creation is a cornerstone of her theodicy, for if creation is conceived this way (as necessarily containing evil within itself), then there is no problem of the entrance of evil into a perfect world. Nor does this constitute a delimitation of God’s omnipotence, if it is not that God could not create a perfect world, but that the act which we refer towards by saying “create” in its very essence implies the impossibility of perfection.

However, this notion of the necessity of evil does not mean that we are simply, originally, and continually doomed; on the contrary, Weil tells us that “Evil is the form which God’s mercy takes in this world.” Weil believed that evil, and its consequence, affliction, served the role of driving us out of ourselves and towards God–“The extreme affliction which overtakes human beings does not create human misery, it merely reveals it.”

More specifically, affliction drives us to what Weil referred to as “decreation”–which is not death, but rather closer to “extinction” (nirvana) in the Buddhist tradition–the willed dissolution of the subjective ego in attaining realization of the true nature of the universe.

(Of course, Weil’s concept of that true nature was a Platonistic or Vedantic one of metaphysical fulness, while the Buddhist concept is one of metaphysical emptiness, but the soteriological strategies and metaphors suffer considerable overlap.)

This withdrawal manifesting as levels in accordance with the vibratory structure of the universe is cosmology.

The difficulty with the genuine spiritual experience that functions with a high quality of energy is that the unconscious state of our being interprets it so it loses its quality and begins functioning with the mechanical and psychic energies. As Father sylvan wrote:

Christianity does not work with either mechanical or psychic energy but with a different level of force to which the name of “spirit” or “spiritual energy” is given. The same is true of all God-given teachings. Christianity becomes Christendom when it begins to revolve around psychic, biological, and mechanical energies, no matter how much it retains the language and the forms which were originally created to channel spiritual energy. Sensitivity to qualities of energy is the one and only touchstone for determining the level of authenticity of Christian practices. The discipline, way of living, ideas, practices, that enable a man to acquire this sensitivity in the whole of himself stands as the esoteric tradition at the heart of every revelation. Only there may one speak of the unity of man’s religions. Every other attempt to identify similarities among traditions is false ecumenism.

It is through conscious attention she believed that one could remain open to profit as a human being from contact with the higher and not just subsist on earthly interpretations.

Perhaps the Atheist isnâ€™t as jumbled up as many Christians are, and they donâ€™t feel obliged to excuse a history that accuses organised piety of killing its spiritual leaders. Our church history is full of shame, and there is no excuse. I just canâ€™t separate myself from it because Iâ€™m no better. Israel has its shame written in the Tanakh, Christianity hides behind apologetics. I find Israelâ€™s method better.

There are many reasons for not becoming a Christian, just as the other forms of organised piety have their weaknesses. We just have to differentiate between the spirituality and the piety that is a result of being â€œpossessedâ€ by the ineffable. Perhaps Simone would have experienced this if she hadnâ€™t contracted Tuberculosis â€“ as it is, she died a Saint.

I agree that Christendom needs work. She recognized this more deeply than I which is why she wasn’t part of the church. But this has nothing to do with the desire for becoming a Christian. Unfortunately, as Father Vincent found out in “Lost Christianity” it is not so easy. He saw how easily it could be lost even after his intense experiences in Africa and finally had to admit that he wasn’t and didn’t know any Christians.

I had to laugh at myself last night. I was thinking on this and I began to feel protective of this depth which is normal for my nature. I then remembered a quote of hers:

Naturally, I would think to myself that she doesn’t belong on the front lines during war volunteering to help as she did. She was much to important to risk premature death. Yet she knew that the horror of everything she was witnessing and enduring was somehow necessary for her being. I then remembered that Peter said to Jesus how he would defend him and no harm would come but Jesus told him he was thinking only from the lower perspective. So much for the nobility of defense with such beings. But I believe I did experience what Peter experienced which only means that I didn’t really understand. The horror wasn’t to be defended against but willfully experienced for karmic reasons.