Biographical
The Intimacy and Resilience of Invisible Friendship: Marie-Magdeleine Davy and Simone Weil
The title comes from chapter 4 of Brenna Moore’s new book, Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2021) pp. 145-171. In it, Moore focuses on the bond between French medievalist Marie Magdeleine Davy (1903-1998) and Simone Weil. Davy and Weil were acquaintances, but after Weil’s death, Davy dedicated significant scholarly attention to Weil’s thought and life. She authored one of the first books on Weil in 1951, lifting her up as a model for a new kind of sanctity in the modern world. In the late 1950s and ’60s, Davy’s projects were animated by what Moore calls an “invisible friendship” with Weil. Spurred on by memories of Weil, in 1962 Davy created an experimental utopian community for international students in rural France, the Maison Simone Weil, in her friend’s honor. As Moore puts it, “Simone Weil, more than anyone else, was Marie-Magdeleine Davy’s invisible friend, her inner guide, and her saint.” The story uncovers one of the many fascinating afterlives of Simone Weil, one that has not yet been told to English-speaking readers.
Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century
This in-depth study examines the social, religious, and philosophical thought of Simone Weil.
Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century presents a comprehensive analysis of Weil’s interdisciplinary thought, focusing especially on the depth of its challenge to contemporary philosophical and religious studies. In a world where little is seen to have real meaning, Eric O. Springsted presents a critique of the unfocused nature of postmodern philosophy and argues that Weil’s thought is more significant than ever in showing how the world in which we live is, in fact, a world of mysteries. Springsted brings into focus the challenges of Weil’s original (and sometimes surprising) starting points, such as an Augustinian priority of goodness and love over being and intellect, and the importance of the Crucifixion. Springsted demonstrates how the mystical and spiritual aspects of Weil’s writings influence her social thought. For Weil, social and political questions cannot be separated from the supernatural. For her, rather, the world has a sacramental quality, such that life in the world is always a matter of life in God―and life in God, necessarily a way of life in the world.
Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century is not simply a guide or introduction to Simone Weil. Rather, it is above all an argument for the importance of Weil’s thought in the contemporary world, showing how she helps us to understand the nature of our belonging to God (sometimes in very strange and unexpected ways), the importance of attention and love as the root of both the love of God and neighbor, the importance of being rooted in culture (and culture’s service to the soul in rooting it in the universe), and the need for human beings to understand themselves as communal beings, not as isolated thinkers or willers. It will be essential reading for scholars of Weil, and will also be of interest to philosophers and theologians.
Eric O. Springsted is the co-founder of the American Weil Society and served as its president for thirty-three years. After a career as a teacher, scholar, and pastor, he is retired and lives in Santa Fe, NM. He is the author and editor of a dozen previous books, including Simone Weil: Late Philosophical Writings (University of Notre Dame Press, 2015).
University of Notre Dame Press, 2021
Simone Weil, une Juive antisémite ? (French edition)
Abstract: A persistent controversy pursues the memory of Simone Weil about the alleged “anti-Semitism” in some of her writings. It is a fact that, within the framework of the spiritual evolution that led Simone Weil to approach Christianity, she made some harsh remarks on the religion of the Hebrews, since her project was to purge the Christian religion of its Jewish imprint in favor of its Greek component. Can such anti-Hebraism be equated with anti-Semitism? The question continues to surface on a regular basis. Robert Chenavier, who edited the last published volumes of the Works of Simone Weil, methodically takes up the matter, on the basis of his intimate knowledge of the author’s thought, in order to dispel once and for all the fallacies and interpretations that fuel this accusation. He examines, in particular, the text of Simone Weil considered to be the most “anti-Semitic,” which she wrote while in London, this in connection with her work for the Free French. This book will be the definitive work on the subject. {translation adapted from Intelligent Translator app}
Simone Weil
Project Gutenberg, sponsored by the World Library Foundation (extended biography from World Heritage Encyclopedia).
Simone Weil (French Edition)
Throughout her life, Simone Weil tried to understand herself and the world and pushed back the horizon of the intelligible to try to think of God. With firmness but using great psychological finesse, she made men’s grandeur and miseries appear in full light. An uncomfortable figure that cannot leave anyone indifferent, she always provokes so many contradictory and often violent reactions. But everyone agrees on one thing: Simone Weil’s strength is her purity.
Florence de Lussy restores this purity of the gaze to us with great honesty, without ever forgetting the excesses and errors of the author of The Need for Roots, depicted here in chiaroscuro. At the end of these pages, it is the great philosopher – who was at the same time a mystic – who imposes herself. A welcome essay, uncompromising and bursting with truth. [translation from the French abstract]
Presses Universitaires de France / Humensis (2021)
About Simone Weil by Eric Springsted
This biographical sketch is reproduced, with permission, from Eric Springsted, Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century (University of Notre Dame Press, 2021), pp. xix-xxi.
Simone Weil (1909—1943)
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Tony Lynch, University of New England
Australia.
A letter to Simone Weil
Catholic Outlook, Diocese of Parramatta, Australia.
Against Religious Fellow-Traveling
This essay argues that Simone Weil’s writings suggest a phenomenological method of particular relevance to investigating ethical questions. It begins by presenting evidence that although Weil does not mention phenomenology explicitly, she thinks about ethics in a phenomenological manner. Subsequent sections outline a “phenomenological ethics” derived from Weil’s notion of attention and her hermeneutics of ‘reading’ the world. Since attention sets aside the self and its personal world, this allows for an ethics of self-abdication (decreation) relatively free of influence by the forces of domination. David Rousset’s term “concentrationary universe” is introduced to describe the claim, argued by Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, and others, that present-day societies show evidence of an increasing reliance on ways of thinking derived from the Nazi concentration camps. Examples are given of applications of Weil’s phenomenological method to the problem of how to recognize signs of potential domination in a concentrationary universe.
Macrina Magazine, no. 6, (December 5, 2020)
