Simone Weil and Theology by Rozelle-Stone A. Rebecca; Stone Lucian;

Author:Rozelle-Stone, A. Rebecca; Stone, Lucian;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Facing the other?

If love is conceptually a paradox for Simone Weil, in her personal life it was arguably “an ordeal.”124 While many, such as Father Joseph-Marie Perrin, marveled at “her love for the disinherited of this world” in all the forms it took, the same has also noted an “interior problem”: “Kind and merciful as she was,” Perrin wrote, “she would sometimes tend to make the exacting demands of a merciless logician.”125 Gustave Thibon remarked that “she was inwardly founded on love like those volcanoes of the arctic regions of which the lava is hidden under a covering of ice.”126 Weil herself, in writing to one of her pupils in the spring of 1935, during the time of her employment at the Renault factories, confesses,

I can tell you that when, at your age, and later on too, I was tempted to try to get to know love, I decided not to—telling myself that it was better not to commit my life in a direction impossible to foresee until I was sufficiently mature to know what, in a general way, I wish from life and what I expect from it.127

It is entirely apropos that this “problem” was evidenced in both Weil’s writings and in the records we have of her short life, for there was rarely, if ever, a bifurcation between these two aspects in her.

Describing the rarity of the authentic unity that typified her life and thought, E. W. F. Tomlin tells us, “The false mystic is concerned with elaborating what he has seen, or with trying to define and convey the emotions which accompanied his vision. Simone Weil is solely engaged in the seeing.”128 Thus, what she sees, that is, what she attends to, will by necessity and definition come to inhabit her being and hence will resist objectification. For instance, Weil readily admitted that there were ideas that would not let her rest, words that had the innate virtue of illumination and edification, but not consolation—“vertical” words such as God, truth, justice, and, significantly for our purposes here, love.129 Such words imply a risk and a danger, because there is the constant temptation to elaborate and posit conceptualizations through associating them with the horizontal and familiar. But because these words refer to absolute perfection, for Weil, and “are the image in our world of [the] impersonal and divine order of the universe,” we should not try to make them conform to our limited paradigms, since their realities are beyond conceptualization.130 Rather, we must accept them as “uncomfortable companions,” and in finding associated ideas and actions in the light they shed, come to abolish “everything in contemporary life which buries the soul under injustice, lies, and ugliness.”131

Love, then, being one such “uncomfortable companion” for Weil and being described as light and not consolation,132 will naturally be found mystifying not only to the intellect but also to the lived experience. Rush Rhees is one scholar who openly struggled with Weil’s notion of purity, especially in its implications for love. In letters to his friend, M.

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