Simone weil: Atheist to Christian

Nick_A

The Force is Strong With This One
"Pity them my children, they are far from home and no one knows them. Let those in quest of God be careful lest appearances deceive them in these people who are peculiar and hard to place; no one rightly knows them but those in whom the same light shines" Meister Eckhart

Hello All

I have a great admiration for true religious individuality. This does not include charlatens or people lost in imagination. As Meister Eckhart suggests, they are hard for us to understand. Where many find it comforting to talk of the unity of humanity in idealistic terms and shining platitudes, I admire those that have experienced the human condition for what it is in themselves as well as society and personally grown as a result in the direction of the true human spirit.

Simone Weil was, I believe, such a person. She was such an individual that she really is impossible to classify. She is one of those few that can only be called an "event." Gurdjieff's grandmother advised the young G not to do as others do.  She would have loved Simone

It almost seems absurd that a woman born in 1909 and dies in 1943, living a brief 34 years, should now become for me not only one of the most profound female thinkers I've read but one of the most dedicated to be brutally honest with her beliefs in relation to herself. I've read some of her writings and will gradually read more but I am in awe that such depth, courage, and sincerity could exist in someone so young.

Needless to say, attempting to deal with what was obvious an inner calling annoyed many. She was very "odd." and probably even frightened some. It was part of a growing process in a world alien to her "being."

Talk about individuality. She was born a French Jew in a fairly well to do home and her parents were fond of Marx and Freud. When very young she was a brilliant anarchist, Atheist, and Marxist.. But not just a talker, she lived her principles and voluntarily entered factory work to experience the human condition.

Her life was so odd but completely genuine that Albert Camus said of her in a letter to Weil's mother in 1951:
Simone Weil, I still know this now, is the only great mind of our times and I hope that those who realize this have enough modesty to not try to appropriate her overwhelming witnessing.

For my part, I would be satisfied if one could say that in my place, with the humble means at my disposal, I served to make known and disseminate her work whose full impact we have yet to measure. 

This is quite different from what was spoken of her when she graduated. Her honesty and dedication to truth was not appreciated. The Director of Career Placement, Ecole Normale Supérieure wrote:

We shall send the Red Virgin as far away as possible so that we shall never hear of her again 


According to Francine du Plessix Gray in a recent biography of Weil, Pope Paul VI claimed her as one of the three—with Pascal and Bernanos—most important influences on his intellectual development. Yet Boris Souvarine, who had been head at one time of the French communist party, but later broke with Stalin, and who was the first to write an authoritative biography of the still living dictator, admired Simone immensely: "She's the most intelligent woman I've met since Rosa Luxemburg," he said.

Who else has been both admired by a Pope Paul V1 and Leon trotsky?

It was her incredible talent and her uncompromising desire to be real that allowed I believe a genuine transition in human psychological growth where she could understand the natural connection between the attractions of Christianity and Atheism. Now who but a true individual could grasp and reconcile such an apparent contradiction?

She experienced, I believe, something similar to what St. Paul did when she writes "Christ himself came down and took possession of me." It is notable that she writes: " God in his mercy had prevented me from reading the mystics, so that it should be evident to me that I had not invented this absolutely unexpected contact." It minimizes the role of imagination. Since she wrote this to a friend knowing she was near death, I don't suspect the usual urge to try and create appearance.

So how does she unite Atheism and Christianity? She does so with a realistic appreciation of the divided state of human nature without any condemnation. She had experienced both with pure intent so her connection was natural. Consider these two quotations:


1. "Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith: in this sense, atheism is a purification. I have to be atheistic with the part of myself which is not made for God. Among those men in whom the supernatural part has not been awakened, the atheists are right and the believers wrong."

2. An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God.


How can such a young person see what so many have missed? Religion isn't for consolation but awakening which the Atheist in their own way invites us to do. They rightly see the mockery that has become of religion but remain locked in denial of anything more. Both Atheists and the Religious will dig their heels in and snarl at one another while she only relates her experience of reconciliation. At one time in her life, as an Atheist, her concern was purely for the societal good . But her courage and desire for the truth itself required her to be open and not just close off in defense of an agenda. In this way she could experience what I believe to be the natural transition into higher understanding that our egotistic self justifications close us off to. Her individualism demanded being open to reality at the expense of her preconceptions.

Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace." Simone Weil
 

Only a few on our planet could equal her ability for conscious attention.  Anyone in the work can profit by reading her notes on attention.

I wonder now if she had known Gurdjieff if he could have extended her life assuming that it would be worth doing.  Perhaps she accomplished what was necessary for her to accomplish.  Yet it is not necessary for her to give her attention so freely but she chose to do it for the sake of humanity.  would G have advised differntly?  I don't know since people on this level are out of my league.

Anyhow, I saw this trailor to a soon to be released documentary on Simone called "An Interview with simone weil" as a contribution to her 100th birthday 2/09.  The film maker speaks of the privileged observer and how attention and her dedication to live without buffers may have led to an early death.  But how many live such a life of truth as Simone?  Even at fourteen she was called "home."  Who am I to judge importance?


Excerpts from a letter Simone Weil wrote on May 15, 1942 in Marseilles, France to her close friend Father Perrin:

At fourteen I fell into one of those fits of bottomless despair that come with adolescence, and I seriously thought of dying because of the mediocrity of my natural faculties. The exceptional gifts of my brother, who had a childhood and youth comparable to those of Pascal, brought my own inferiority home to me. I did not mind having no visible successes, but what did grieve me was the idea of being excluded from that transcendent kingdom to which only the truly great have access and wherein truth abides. I preferred to die rather than live without that truth. After months of inward darkness, I suddenly had the everlasting conviction that any human being, even though practically devoid of natural faculties, can penetrate to the kingdom of truth reserved for genius, if only he longs for truth and perpetually concentrates all his attention upon its attainment. He thus becomes a genius too,

It was this power of attention that allowed her to see the world as meaningless and filled with "mad machines."

"To believe in God is not a decision we can make. All we can do is decide not to give our love to false gods. In the first place, we can decide not to believe that the future contains for us an all-sufficient good. The future is made of the same stuff as the present....

"...It is not for man to seek, or even to believe in God. He has only to refuse to believe in everything that is not God. This refusal does not presuppose belief. It is enough to recognize, what is obvious to any mind, that all the goods of this world, past, present, or future, real or imaginary, are finite and limited and radically incapable of satisfying the desire which burns perpetually with in us for an infinite and perfect good... It is not a matter of self-questioning or searching. A man has only to persist in his refusal, and one day or another God will come to him."
-- Weil, Simone, ON SCIENCE, NECESSITY, AND THE LOVE OF GOD, edited by Richard Rees, London, Oxford University Press, 1968.- ©

Simone lived without buffers and I wonder how Gurdjieff would have dealt with her if the opportunity arose.

Anyhow this video introduces the gift of attention.  Did it kill her?  I don't believe so.  Such people as I've read are like comets who enter our lives, stir everything up, and move on.  That she did and on her 100th birthday I will raise a toast in honer of the sincerity of her life and efforts in the quest to be real.

_http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKFzgIRmZeU
 
I'm also an admirer of Simone Weil. Her writings and biography had a profound impact on me when I was young. She did, indeed, live without buffers, and she inspired me to try and live my life with the same unflinching commitment to authenticity....
 
Hi Pepper

Well then we can toast her together on her 100th birthday 2/3/09. For some reason when the topic was moved, the link became inactive. Anyhow, I think this works.

It is amazing to me how only seven people were at her funeral other than family and it has been a labor of love to introduce her notes, letters, and essays into society through organizing them in books. There is no money in Simone since she doesn't flatter the ego yet here she is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKFzgIRmZeU

Just this insight into attention is incredible:

"Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated by the object. It means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of. Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object which is to penetrate it."

"Absolute unmixed attention is prayer. "

How someone so young has learned how to get out of her own way????
 
Thank you Nick for those very interesting data about Simone Weil (not to be confused with Simone Veil).

Nick_A said:
How someone so young has learned how to get out of her own way????

I guess that the age of the body doesn't have much to do with the knowledge of the soul. Maybe Simone Weil went through numerous and fruitful previous incarnations.

Thus during this WWII incarnation she managed to reach, express and share such high levels of truth.
 
Simone Weil said:
"Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated by the object. It means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of. Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object which is to penetrate it."

"Absolute unmixed attention is prayer. "

Sounds like what the Cs call "Non-anticipation" and "really ASKing".
 
Belibaste said:
Thank you Nick for those very interesting data about Simone Weil (not to be confused with Simone Veil).

Nick_A said:
How someone so young has learned how to get out of her own way????

I guess that the age of the body doesn't have much to do with the knowledge of the soul. Maybe Simone Weil went through numerous and fruitful previous incarnations.

Thus during this WWII incarnation she managed to reach, express and share such high levels of truth.

Hi Belibaste

Gurdjieff told Ouspensky that reincarnation happens at times for partially developed souls. My guess is that Simone was a partially developed soul. In her letter to father Perrin shortly before her death, she mentions feeling as being born on the inside.

The idea of purity, with all that this word can imply for a Christian, took possession of me at the age of sixteen, after a period of several months during which I had been going through the emotional unrest natural in adolescence. This idea came to me when I was contemplating mountain landscape and little by little it was imposed upon me in an irresistible manner.

Of course I knew quite well that my conception of life was Christian. That is why it never occurred to me that I could enter the Christian community. I had the idea that I was born inside. But to add dogma to this conception of life, without being forced to do so by indisputable evidence, would have seemed to me like a lack of honesty. I should even have thought I was lacking in honesty had I considered the question of the truth of dogma as a problem for myself or even had I simply desired to reach a conclusion on this subject. I have an extremely severe standard for intellectual honesty, so severe that I never met anyone who did not seem to fall short of it in more than one respect; and I am always afraid of failing in it myself.

Here she refers to a quality of consciousness that is extremely rare.

During all this time of spiritual progress I had never prayed. I was afraid of the power of suggestion that is in prayer -- the very power for which Pascal recommends it. Pascal's method seems to me one of the worst for attaining faith.

Contact with you was not able to persuade me to pray. On the contrary I thought the danger was all the greater, since I also had to beware of the power of suggestion in my friendship with you. At the same time I found it very difficult not to pray and not to tell you so. Moreover I knew I could not tell you without completely misleading you about myself. At that time I should not have been able to make you understand.

Until last September I had never once prayed in all my life, at least not in the literal sense of the word. I had never said any words to God, either out loud or mentally. I had never pronounced a liturgical prayer. I had occasionally recited the Salve Regina, but only as a beautiful poem.

Last summer, doing Greek with T-, I went through the Our Father word for word in Greek. We promised each other to learn it by heart. I do not think he ever did so, but some weeks later, as I was turning over the pages of the Gospel, I said to myself that since I had promised to do this thing and it was good, I ought to do it. I did it. The infinite sweetness of this Greek text so took hold of me that for several days I could not stop myself from saying it over all the time. A week afterward I began the vine harvest I recited the Our Father in Greek every day before work, and I repeated it very often in the vineyard.

Since that time I have made a practice of saying it through once each morning with absolute attention. If during the recitation my attention wanders or goes to sleep, in the minutest degree, I begin again until I have once succeeded in going through it with absolutely pure attention. Sometimes it comes about that I say it again out of sheer pleasure, but I only do it if I really feel the impulse.

The effect of this practice is extraordinary and surprises me every time, for, although I experience it each day, it exceeds my expectation at each repetition.

At times the very first words tear my thoughts from my body and transport it to a place outside space where there is neither perspective nor point of view. The infinity of the ordinary expanses of perception is replaced by an infinity to the second or sometimes the third degree. At the same time, filling every part of this infinity of infinity, there is silence, a silence which is not an absence of sound but which is the object of a positive sensation, more positive than that of sound. Noises, if there are any, only reach me after crossing this silence.

Sometimes, also, during this recitation or at other moments, Christ is present with me in person, but his presence is infinitely more real, more moving, more clear than on that first occasion when he took possession of me.

I should never have been able to take it upon myself to tell you all this had it not been for the fact that I am going away. And as I am going more or less with the idea of probable death, I do not believe that I have the right to keep it to myself. For after all, the whole of this matter is not a question concerning me myself. It concerns God. I am really nothing in it all. If one could imagine any possibility of error in God, I should think that it had all happened to me by mistake. But perhaps God likes to use castaway objects, waste, rejects. After all, should the bread of the host be moldy, it would become the Body of Christ just the same after the priest had consecrated it. Only it cannot refuse, while we can disobey. It sometimes seems to me that when I am treated in so merciful a way, every sin on my part must be a mortal sin. And I am constantly committing them....

excerpted from WAITING FOR GOD by Simone Weil - Harper & Row, New York, 1951, translated by Emma Craufurd (title is also translated as "Waiting ON God")

French © La Colombe Edition du Vieux Colombier, 1950
English © G.P.Putnam's & Sons and Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951, 1979
All Rights Reserved


What is the infinity to the second or third degree? Her quality of attention could achieve such consciousness?

I would never underestimate Simone. With the overwhelming majority I would consider the following story just French BS. But with Simone, who knows?

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/relig/enc/stories/s116621.htm

Simone Weil's life and work has played a big part in your life. Could you perhaps, give us a brief anecdote to end with?

Well, here is an astonishing story. Though it has to do with Simone's after-life, am not making this up. I tell it because it has illustrative value.
A man had a dream... He dreamt that he entered into a building, took an elevator up to the top floor, where he found a door and pushed the buzzer. Upon being invited to enter, he walked across an apartment and reached a room where he saw a large table at which someone was seated, who looked as if she might be a scholar.
"You must know many languages", he told her.
"Where I am, we speak only one language", she answered.
At this point, the man woke up. The language in question he guessed to be that of love.
Some time later, after he discovered the writings of Simone Weil, he made by telephone an appointment with Mrs Selma Weil (Simone's mother), and proceeded to number 3, rue Auguste Comte in Paris. When he came to the building, he recognised it. And he entered the very elevator he used in his dream, reached the same floor, saw the same door, walked through the same apartment and came to the same room, where stood the same table. On the wall, he noticed a photo which was that of the very same person he had seen in his dream. The books of Simone Weil he had read had not been illustrated. Thus he saw there for the first time the features of the person he had met in his sleep.
Since this story was told to me by the man himself, a reverend and furthermore a psychiatrist, and "there are more things in heaven and earth" than our philosophy can think of, I did not doubt his tale. He is dead now, but I hesitate to mention his name. The gist of the matter however is that this story brings home a point which was made by Pascal: "C'est le coeur qui connait Dieu." "It is through the heart that we know God". And, may I add: "And everything else also."

One thing I know for sure about Simone is that Gurdjieff's grandmother would have loved her since she never did as others do but was truly unique and brave enough to live without buffers for the sake of truth!
 
Laura said:
Simone Weil said:
"Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated by the object. It means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of. Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object which is to penetrate it."

"Absolute unmixed attention is prayer. "

Sounds like what the Cs call "Non-anticipation" and "really ASKing".

Yes it does seem like the expression of a need that comes from the depth of our being that our personalities are unaware of and which brings a whole different meaning to prayer most are unaware of.
 
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