[NondualitySalon] Amazing Simone Weil

[Guest guest]

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Liliana Pechal <wiosna

NondualitySalon <NondualitySalon >

Friday, February 18, 2000 5:56 AM

[NondualitySalon] Amazing Simone Weil

 

>"Liliana Pechal" <wiosna

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>>http://www.rivertext.com/simone_weil.shtml

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snip

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>Thank you for this link, Glo. I had a rather vague idea about her, I don't

think I ever read anything. The above kind of sums up nicely quite a few threads

discussed lately here.

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>Love,

>Liliana

>

Excellent choice of an excerpt. I was directed by my philosophy teacher to read

her book while in college. This short page of excerpts makes me want to re-read

her. I hope more have looked at it. _Glo

 

Simone Weil -- 1909-1943

Simone Weil (pronounced "vey") is the patron philosopher of the If Monks had

Macs... new media library. She wrote with the clarity of a brilliant mind

educated in the best French schools, the social conscience of a grass-roots

labor organizer, and the certainty and humility of a Christian mystic. Andre

Gide called her the saint of all outsiders. Despite her rapturous love of Jesus

Christ, she never ceased to study the truths of the religions of the East. She

stayed outside of any church, but her passionate need to share the sufferings of

others led her to fight with the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, to work as

a field hand and an unskilled laborer, and ultimately to die in England at the

age of 34 from tuberculosis complicated by her refusing to eat more than

Hitler's rations allotted to her countrymen in occupied France. After her death

writers as diverse as T.S Eliot and Albert Camus declared her one of our

century's foremost thinkers.

 

"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.- ©