Book Review: Marie Cabaud Meaney, “Simone Weil’s Apologetic Use of Literature: Her Christological Interpretations of Ancient Greek Texts”
Modern Philology, vol. 109, no. 3
Modern Philology, vol. 109, no. 3
Excerpt:
This is a book of essays by different authors – some principally scholars of the work of Simone Weil, others philosophers of religion and theologians – whose general area is indicated by the title. It is a book to be welcomed, if only because Weil’s work is important and interesting, but, with one or two notable exceptions, is little discussed in mainstream English-speaking philosophy of religion. There are many reasons for this lack of attention to Weil: the scattered, note-book form of much of her writing; the aphoristic style she often adopts; the difficulty of properly capturing her sense of things in English; the mystical strain in her work; there are no doubt others. Indeed, one of these other reasons is pointed out by David Tracy: there is a sense in which Weil is an impossible figure because she was herself so keenly aware of the sense, or senses, in which Christianity – by which I mean, leading a life that genuinely seeks to be Christ-like (as Weil herself did), not that other thing, membership of a kind of club – is impossible. I am not, however, entirely clear what Tracy means by ‘impossible’ here: I myself, as I have intimated, would see it in the demand to love all human beings, in the requirement of infinite forgiveness, in the injunction never to judge and so on. Tracy, however, relates it to the notion of the tragic, claiming that ‘Weil. . . restored tragedy to a [his emphasis] prominent place in both the reading of Plato and the reading of Christianity’ (240). There is something in this, but it would have been good to have a more detailed discussion: Tracy, for example, sees clearly that Weil’s readings are often wilful – he is especially critical of her understanding of Judaism – and one might wonder whether she is just as wilful (as I suspect she is) in her reading of, for example, Plato, to whom a tragic vision seems in so many ways deeply alien. Or again, Tracy refers to Weil’s sense of fate and our being cursed, and I would very much have liked to see these extremely interesting notions dealt with in more detail in his otherwise very suggestive paper.
Ars Disputandi, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 80-84 (2006)
New York Times, Sept. 6, 1987, p.82
The New York Review of Books, February 1, 1963, Reviewed: Selected Essays by Simone Weil, Richard Rees, trans., Oxford University Press.
New York Times Book Review, Aug. 31, 1952