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Book Review: Waiting for God

Ronald Collins read

Excerpt

Enter now Francine Du Plessix Gray and her Simone Weil. This concise biography is the latest installment in the remarkable Penguin Lives series. Gray, a respected novelist whose last book was an in-depth study of the Marquis de Sade, offers up her biography of Weil in a commanding and balanced birth-to-death manner. It is a sophisticated introduction to Simone Weil, to the complicated life and mind of a paradox quartered in an emaciated frame clad in ragtag clothes. Gray admirably covers much basic history — from Weil’s years at the Lycee Henri IV to her employment in heavy-industry factories to her involvement in the Free French movement — in a short space.

This fairly well-documented biography (which taps some French sources) ably captures several sides of Simone Weil: the “red virgin,” the “categorical imperative in skirts,” the “sergeant-major angel,” the estranged Jew, the first “postmodern theologian.” In one of her last letters, to her parents, Weil wrote: “There is within me a deposit of pure gold which must be handed on.” Indeed. Her genius spanned much ground from the contextual to the universal, the political to the spiritual, and the scientific to the aesthetic. With her, the personal was cerebral. Her life was her thought and vice-versa.

Washington Post, May 27, 2001 (book review). Reviewing Simone Weil: A Penguin Life by Francine Du Plessix Gray (2001)

“Decreation as Destruction or as Creation?”

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The ethical implications of Simone Weil’s “decreation” are perhaps the most controversial of her work and it is difficult to determine if she is asserting a violent destruction of the human body or a creation of the human spirit as linked with God. Rowan Williams claims that Weil’s decreation requires the “I” to dissolve completely and thus collapses the site of ethics but Yoon Sook Cha argues that the ethical site opened in Weil is not the “I” but the “in-between”. I will suggest that decreation holds both destruction/ death and creation/ life open in order to enter a radical shift in perspective from dualistic to relational through the creation of a bridge between the I and God.

Kathryn Lawson is a Ph.D. Candidate in the department of philosophy at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

ONLINE CLASS: “Simone Weil: Secular Saint” (Nov. 2022)

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Lecture-Based with Discussion (hosted by Politics  & Prose Bookstore, Washington, D.C.)

Simone Weil lived between 1909 and 1943, her short life bracketed by the First and Second World Wars and shaped by the political and economic upheavals that came between.  She registered the anguish of her time with exquisite sensitivity and felt called in the face of this suffering to rethink her collapsing civilization to its roots.  In the 1930s, she was active on the political left, involving herself in trade union politics worker education and the Spanish Civil War.  Albert Camus called her essays of this period “the most penetrating and prophetic contributions to Western social and political thought since Marx.”  Then, in her last years, a mystical spiritual perspective unexpectedly opened to her, and she came, she said, “to know the love of God as intimately as the smile of a friend.” Despite her personal devotion to the Christian Gospel, however, she refused baptism into the Christian Church just as firmly as she refused to identify herself with the Judaism of her family heritage. She died alone in a British sanitorium where she was being treated for tuberculosis at age 34, defying the orders of her doctors to eat a heathy diet on the grounds that she would take no more than her compatriots in the French Resistance had available to them.

Genuine originality is almost unimaginable today in the moral, political and religious dimensions of our lives and societies. We rightly sense that were it to appear, it would be strange and deeply disturbing. This is the importance and fascination of Simone Weil. She puts a human face on the suffering of those who are starving for justice, for truth, for human dignity and love – in other words, all of us – and challenges us to allow our attention to dwell on what is all around us, yet remains unseen.

In his highly acclaimed biographical study of Simone Weil, Robert Coles, distinguished professor of Psychiatry and Pulitzer Prize winner, characterizes her as a brilliant and effective person whose life and death are most remarkable for the paradoxes with which they confront and challenge each of us as human beings. Through a close reading of several her best-known essays, this course will attempt to bring those paradoxes into clear relief as a focus for personal reflection.

  • Six Thursdays: November 3, 10, 17, (no class 11/24- Thanksgiving), and December 1, 8, 15, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. EST Online

Cost

  • $170.00 per person

Required books:

  • Simone Weil: An Anthology, ed. Sian Miles, 9780802137296
  • Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage, by Robert Coles, 9781683362975

Frank Ambrosio is a Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. After studying Italian language and literature in Florence, Italy, he completed his doctoral degree at Fordham University with a specialization in contemporary European Philosophy. He is the founding Director, with Edward Maloney, of the Georgetown University “My Dante Project” a web-based platform for personal and collaborative study of Dante’s Commedia. In 2014, he acted as lead instructor for the launch of an ongoing web-based course (MOOC) on Dante offered by EDX which currently has been utilized by over 20,000 students. He is the author of Dante and Derrida: Face to Face, (State University of New York Press, 2012).

He has received five separate awards from Georgetown University for excellence in teaching. He is the former Director of the Doctor of Liberal Studies Program, and in 2015, he received the Award for Faculty Achievement from the American Association of Graduate Liberal Studies Programs. In October 2009, The Teaching Company released his course, “Philosophy, Religion and the Meaning of Life,” a series of 36 half-hour video lectures which he created for the “Great Courses” series. At Georgetown, he teaches courses on Existentialism, Postmodernism, Hermeneutics, and Dante.

In addition to his work at Georgetown, he co-directs The Renaissance Company with Deborah R. Warin, leading adult study programs focusing on Italian Renaissance culture and its contemporary heritage.

“Countermimesis and Simone Weil’s Christian Platonism”

Cyril O’Regan

in Doering, E. Jane & Springsted, Eric, eds, The Christian Platonism of Simone Weil, Notre Dame: IN: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 181-208

“Why You Should Think That God Does Not Exist (Simone Weil, Meister Eckhart, and Thomas Aquinas)”

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chatforgod.com

Suffering Divine Things: Simone Weil and Jewish Mysticism

Rico Sneller read

To what extent can man suffer God? The verb ‘suffering’ as such is ambiguous, for it can either mean bearing ‘pain’ (‘to suffer from’), or tolerating something. In other words, ‘suffering’ can be both intransitive and transitive. Whereas the first meaning seems to be predominantly passive, the second, while still fairly passive, is more active. In both cases, however, a kind of interpenetration of both ‘parties’ is implied: that which I am suffering is somehow inside me, whether I want it or not. Anyhow, the question, ‘can man suffer God?’, turns out to be in need of clarification before it can be answered at all.

In this contribution, I will study a Jewish author who ‘exchanged’ her Judaism for Christianity: Simone Weil (1909-1943). I will try to see what she writes about suffering God, it being my hypothesis that suffering God is a more adequate notion than the vaguer ‘experiencing’ God. Suffering God, or rather, suffering divine things might be a notion accounting for the conflation of ethical, spiritual, and global dimensions. I will try to shed some light on Simone Weil’s views by relating them to some motives from the Jewish mystical tradition: ‘cosmoeroticism’, kawanna and tsimtsum.

Mahmoud Masaeli, ed., Spirituality and Global Ethics (Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2017), pp. 9-26