“The Necessary Non-Existence of God”
in Richard H. Bell, ed., Simone Weil’s Philosophy of Culture: Readings Toward Divine Humanity, New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 52-76
Recommended
“Was Simone Weil a Jew?”
Partisan Review, vol. 68, no. 4, pp. 629-641
Simone Weil: 2023 Colloquy on Decreation, Capitalism, Ecofeminism, and Sacrifice in the Cadre of Work
The Pandemic of Force: A Weilian Review of Apollo’s Arrow
Effing the Ineffable: The Mysticism of Simone Weil and Ludwig Wittgenstein
Both Simone Weil and Ludwig Wittgenstein hold mysticism—i.e., the belief in something utterly transcendent—centrally. The mysticism present in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus presents a problem: if “the mystical” is “deep” nonsense, and there is something important that cannot be sensibly presented in language, we are left in an undesirable situation. The mystical is taken to be of paramount importance but is ultimately inaccessible to reason. Weil, starting with political and theological considerations, arrives at a similar problem. A mystical position yields the “problem of mysticism”: There is the mystical; it is of crucial importance, and it is inaccessible to our reason. Weil’s mystical praxis of decreation is a solution to the problem. This does not present a way that we can come to the mystical, but a way that we can become aware of its revelation, which bypasses our reason.
Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia, MA dissertation.
Parola e musica nel tempo di Avvento 2021 2°- Simone Weil (thoughts and music for Advent 2021 2°- Simone Weil) {Italian}
- Antonio Gargiulo, voce recitante,
- Matteo Galli, improvvisazioni musicali all’ organo,
- Chiara Gibillini, elaborazione testi regia,
- Marco Elli, riprese e montaggio video
Simone Weil: An Anthology
Sian Miles, editor, Virago Press
Albert Camus, Simone Weil and the Absurd
According to Camus, it is only in the face of the absurd – and through our unremitting revolt against it – that meaning can be generated. Espousing the Christian faith abnegates the absurd and with it the only possible source of meaning for modem man. This critique can be addressed by engaging with Simone Weil. She develops an original dialectic of divine absence (in the laws of indifferent ’necessity’ and affliction) and presence, which reflects the intra-Trinitarian unity and distance of the divine Persons, and which finds ultimate expression on the Cross of Christ. For her this dialectic does not induce revolt but a sophisticated kind of reconciliation that involves a selfless openness to, and engagement with, this world.
Irish Theological Quarterly, vol. 70, pp. 343-354
Religion, Collaboration, and Resistance during the Second World War (abstract)
Panel Abstract:
The collaboration/resistance divide in France could be porous, as the many examples of collabo-resistance illustrate. Double-jeu, duplicity, was the coin of the realm. One revealing indicator is that Vichy France, while de facto a subaltern ally of Hitler, de jure remained in a state of war with Nazi Germany.
The two women and one Jesuit discussed in this session, demonstrate how religious commitments may further complicate this problematic. French Catholicism had long been engaged in resistance — but against a very different opponent. On the eve of the Second World War, fiercely opposed to the state’s aggressive laïcité, some Catholics preferred the Third Reich in Germany to the Third Republic in France. Thus, the natural instinct of such faithful was support for Marshall Philippe Pétain’s policy of collaboration with Nazi Germany.
Yet a spiritual resistance to Nazism, nurtured among French Jesuits by Henri de Lubac (1896-1991), did emerge. This abandoned the obsession with restoring the confessional ancien regime. Instead, it proposed transcending old battles against the Republic through an alternative, a collective spiritual mobilization beyond secular politico-centricity. It drew upon the resources of the Church’s intellectual arsenal — e.g. aspects of theology, ecclesiastical structure, and biblical scholarship — reformulated to meet new challenges. However, since the church of both de Lubac and Pétain was ultimately the same, the new vision could not break sharply with the past. Consequently, both demonstrated significant political similarities, as SARAH SHORTALL’s paper discussing the Jesuit journal of resistance, Témoignage chrétien, (Christian Witness) reveals.
Through the scholar of Cistercian monasticism, Marie Magdeleine Davy (1903-98), BRENNA MOORE addresses a more forceful resource for resistance, mysticism and comparative religion. During the war, Davy sheltered and organized the escape of Allied aviators downed in France even as her scholarship attacked the fantasy of the so-called West, a pure white Christian Europe, propagated by the highly influential Henri Massis. Davy herself acknowledged how her immersion in the texts of medieval Christian mysticism had sustained her rejection of Vichy.
Simone Weil (1909-43), another philosopher-mystic, clandestinely distributed Témoignage chrétien and knew Davy, but her trajectory diverged from both, according to BENJAMIN BRAUDE. She came under the influence of antimodernist acolytes of Massis and the monarchist antisemite Charles Maurras, who illegally fashioned elements of her posthumous oeuvre into a Trojan horse insinuating neo-Pétainism into France at mid-century. Weil’s tortured political-religious behavior during the war and her post-war legacy accentuate the porousness of the divide between opposing and supporting Vichy.
___________
Annual meetings of the American Historical Association and the American Catholic Historical Association (Jan. 2022)
Panel: Religion, Collaboration, and Resistance during the Second World War
Chair: Charles Gallagher, S.J., Boston College
Papers:
“The Weapons of the Spirit: Catholic Theology and the Resistance to Nazism in France”
— Sarah Shortall, University of Notre Dame
“Mysticism and Resistance: The Case of Marie-Magdeleine Davy”
— Brenna Moore, Fordham University
“The Collabo-Resistance of Simone Weil”
— Benjamin Braude, Boston College
Comment:
Bernard M. J. Wasserstein, University of Chicago
