4.0
Love in the Void
ByPublisher Description
Simone Weil, the great mystic and philosopher for our age, shows where anyone can find God.
Why is it that Simone Weil, with her short, troubled life and confounding insights into faith and doubt, continues to speak to today’s spiritual seekers? Was it her social radicalism, which led her to renounce privilege? Her ambivalence toward institutional religion? Her combination of philosophical rigor with the ardor of a mystic?
Albert Camus called Simone Weil “the only great spirit of our time.” André Gide found her “the most truly spiritual writer of this century.” Her intense life and profound writings have influenced people as diverse as T. S. Eliot, Charles De Gaulle, Pope Paul VI, and Adrienne Rich.
The body of work she left—most of it published posthumously—is the fruit of an anguished but ultimately luminous spiritual journey.
After her untimely death at age thirty-four, Simone Weil quickly achieved legendary status among a whole generation of thinkers. Her radical idealism offered a corrective to consumer culture. But more importantly, she pointed the way, especially for those outside institutional religion, to encounter the love of God – in love to neighbor, love of beauty, and even in suffering.
Why is it that Simone Weil, with her short, troubled life and confounding insights into faith and doubt, continues to speak to today’s spiritual seekers? Was it her social radicalism, which led her to renounce privilege? Her ambivalence toward institutional religion? Her combination of philosophical rigor with the ardor of a mystic?
Albert Camus called Simone Weil “the only great spirit of our time.” André Gide found her “the most truly spiritual writer of this century.” Her intense life and profound writings have influenced people as diverse as T. S. Eliot, Charles De Gaulle, Pope Paul VI, and Adrienne Rich.
The body of work she left—most of it published posthumously—is the fruit of an anguished but ultimately luminous spiritual journey.
After her untimely death at age thirty-four, Simone Weil quickly achieved legendary status among a whole generation of thinkers. Her radical idealism offered a corrective to consumer culture. But more importantly, she pointed the way, especially for those outside institutional religion, to encounter the love of God – in love to neighbor, love of beauty, and even in suffering.
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4.0
“"We live in a world of unreality and dreams. To give up our imaginary position as the center, to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence. A transformation then takes place at the very roots of our sensibility, in our immediate reception of sense impressions and psychological impressions. It is a transformation analogous to that which takes place in the dusk of evening on a road, where we suddenly discern as a tree what we had at first seen as a stooping man; or where we suddenly recognize as a rustling of leaves what we thought at first was whispering voices. We see the same colors; we hear the same sounds, but not in the same way."”
About Simone Weil
Born in 1909 to a Jewish family in Paris, Simone Weil had a privileged childhood. An academic prodigy, she left a teaching career to become a factory worker in order to better feel and know the afflictions of the working class. Though drawn to pacifism, she went to Spain to fight the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War. An agnostic, her hunger for beauty, virtue, and goodness was fed by her conviction that anyone can enter “the kingdom of truth” if only “he longs for truth and perpetually concentrates all his attention on its attainment.” She never conceived of the possibility of a “real contact, person to person, here below, between a human being and God” until one day “Christ himself came down and took possession of me.” Though she would remain religiously unaffiliated her entire life, the reality of this experience never left her. Simone Weil fled France when the Nazis invaded and joined the French resistance in London. In solidarity, she committed to eating the same rations as the men at the front. During the summer of 1943, she contracted tuberculosis and, weakened by malnourishment, she died within weeks.
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