Word: weil
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...NOTEBOOKS OF SIMONE WEIL (2 Vols., 648 pp.)-Translated by Arthur Wills-Putnam...
...almost civil-service precision, saintly works are not enough, and miracles are not required. What seems to be necessary is a sort of rapport with the time's intellectual torments, a capacity for drilling and painfully hitting some universal nerve. That, apparently, is the special gift of Simone Weil, a Frenchwoman who died in 1943 at 34 and who has since been informally canonized as a "saint of the churchless," a "patron of the undecided...
...what has attracted attention to Simone Weil, more than her sometimes foolish, sometimes heroic life, is her inner struggle, on which she reported in books such as Waiting for God, Gravity and Grace. Her Notebooks, now published in English for the first time, are probably the most personal account of that struggle. If some of the jottings in these two volumes make her seem like the lead scout of the troubled lost battalion of agnosticism, many more confirm a rare and remarkable religious vocation...
...mystics, she hoped to transcend self. "We possess nothing in this world-for chance may deprive us of everything-except the power to say 'I.' It is that which has to be offered up to God, that is to say, destroyed." In common with other mystics, Simone Weil skirts the dilemma of how a totally effaced self can remain sentient enough to experience the ineffable joy of its oneness with God, in the rare event that it should be achieved. Simone Weil's own most telling religious experience: "a presence more personal, more certain, more real, than...
...belief that God created man "in His own image" was apparently alien to Simone Weil, who could not see why God, who is infinite, should create something "that is outside himself, that is not himself." The only way to bridge the contradiction, she felt, was through Christ on the Cross. "It is not by eating the fruit of a certain tree, as Adam thought, that one becomes the equal of God, but by going the way of the Cross." It is perhaps not too far-fetched to suggest that Simone Weil's obsession with becoming "the equal...