Pentimento: "Solidarity with the souls in hell"

Sunday, October 10, 2010

"Solidarity with the souls in hell"

Heather King has written a really interesting post about Simone Weil's troubling refusal to be baptized.

8 comments:

Rodak said...: I believe that Simone Weil's primary reason for not joining the Church is not directly touched upon in Heather King's post. In a letter to her friend, Father Perrin, Simone Weil wrote:

I should like to draw your attention to one point. It is that there is an absolutely insurmountable obstacle to the incarnation of Christianity. It is the use of the two little words "anathema sit." I remain with all those things that cannot enter the Church, the universal repository, because of those two little words. I remain with them all the more because my own intelligence is numbered with them... The proper function of the intelligence demands total freedom... In order that the present attitude of the Church might be effective and that she might really penetrate like a wedge into social existence, she would have to say openly that she had changed or wished to change... After the fall of the Roman Empire, which had been totalitarian, it was the Church that was the first to establish a rough sort of totalitarianism in Europe in the thirteenth century, after the war with the Alibgensians... And the motive power of this totalitarianism was the use of those two little words "anathema sit." [excerpted from "Simone Weil - an Anthology, ed. Sian Miles. The elispses are Miles']; October 11, 2010 at 7:33 AM
Pentimento said...: I was unaware of this aspect of her resistance, Rodak. I've read that she had expressed to Perrin her unease with entering the Church when so many souls would always be outside of it. Have you left this comment on Heather King's post too? You should.; October 11, 2010 at 7:53 AM
Rodak said...: Yes, I did leave this on Heather's post as well. Simone Weil was greatly drawn to the Albigensians. I read somewhere that it was a practice among some of the Cathars for their high spiritual leaders to starve themselves as part of a complete withdrawal from the world of material desires. The suggestion there is that it was in imitation of this practice that Simone Weil starved herself to death. Although she seems to have believed that the Church was the only legitimate depository of Christianity in our age, she also found it to be corrupt in certain aspects which prevented her from accepting baptism in the Church. So it was more than just solidarity with the damned, although that also factored into it.; October 11, 2010 at 11:30 AM
Pentimento said...: The thing that troubles me about Weil is her apparent belief in the importance and efficacy of her extreme self-mortifications. That, coupled by her choosing to set herself outside and apart from the universal church, seems to bespeak a misguided excess of ego.; October 11, 2010 at 2:09 PM
Rodak said...: Ascesis inescapably focuses on the individual. If one draws attention to one's ascetic practices, in a show of ostentatious super-piety, then one can be accused of a kind of "reverse pride." Simone Weil, however, lived and died in obscurity. Her fame grew mainly after her death, as those who knew her personally began to publish her letters, notebooks and journals; and to write books about her. We can't read her heart. All we can do is read her writings--which are brilliant, although often extreme--and take whatever there is in them from which we have the capacity to learn.; October 11, 2010 at 3:44 PM
Rodak said...: Also posted at Heather's blog:

It is indeed difficult to reconcile much of Weil's thought (and deed) with orthodoxy. But that said, one of her aphoristic sayings, which I think demands serious contemplation was: "Contradiction is the lever of transcendence."; October 11, 2010 at 8:41 PM
Heather King said...: Thank you so much for posting to Shirt of Flame, contributing to the dialogue on Simone Weil, and for your own wonderful blog. Joan Sutherland is bringing in the dawn here in L.A.!...; October 12, 2010 at 8:54 AM
Pentimento said...: You're welcome, Heather. I love your writing. If you search for your name here, you'll see that spent a couple of posts last year reviewing Redeemed.; October 12, 2010 at 11:02 AM