Body
Contents of this article
- 1.
- 2. Works by Simone Weil
- 3. Simone Weil comes from expectation
- 4.Who plays the theologian Weil?
Works by Simone Weil
From Expectation
Preface: On the Misfortune of the Innocent
01 On the Misfortune of the Innocent
02 On Necessity and Obedience
03 The Soul Turns toward God
04 The Quality of Attention
05 The most precious wealth cannot be found
06 Only justice can bring harmony to the will
07 Listen to the voice of an unfortunate person
08 Give thanks to those who do not know to whom the bread is given
09 Love the world Order
10 Beauty is the only purpose in the world
11 Physical love desires the beauty of the world
12 The common light shines on all living beings
13 Love of religious and ceremonial activities
14 Eyes fixed on perfect purity
15 What is holy requires no effort
16 Friendship as human love
17 Inner love and outward love
18 Burden and grace
19 Vanity and reward
20 Acceptance Void
21 Detachment22 Imagination that fills the void
23 Abandoning time
24 Objectless desire
25 I
26 Lost creation
27 Subduction
28 Inevitability and Obedience
This book is some of Weil's essays. There is an extraordinary beauty to her writing. This beauty makes us wonder if her existence is real. Weil's thoughts are different from anyone else's. Yes, she was a crazy lover and follower of God... This gives us a good reason to explain the unimaginable absoluteness and indifference in her writings.
The following are a few sentences I excerpted, I hope everyone can feel something:
1 People can only accept the existence of misfortune when they look at it from a certain distance.
2 Loving truth means accepting emptiness, then emptiness, then death. Truth goes with death.
3 Attachment is not something else, it is just a lack of real feelings. People are attached to the possession of things because they think that if they no longer have this thing, it will no longer exist. Many people do not grasp with their whole being the vast difference between a city being destroyed and their leaving it forever.
4 Nothing that exists is absolutely unworthy of love.
Therefore, love what does not exist.
However, this non-existent love object is not imaginary. For our imaginations cannot be more worthy of love than ourselves, who are not worthy of love ourselves.
5 Beauty is a kind of fruit that people look at without reaching out to it;
it is also a kind of misfortune that people look at without retreating.
6 There is a misfortune in which people cannot afford to endure it, nor can they escape from it.
7 Qualifications are proof that God loves us.
...
She doesn’t love God like she wants to be an angel, her love for God is abandonment.
Burden and Divine Grace
Some people compare Weil's "Burden and Divine Grace" with Pascal's "Thoughts", and call Weil the "contemporary Pascal". This outstanding French religious thinker of the 20th century followed Pascal's path of mystical belief: faith is not something to show off, but a difficult and by no means easy burden. This book is not a systematic and specialized treatise. It was compiled after Weil's death by Weil's friend and famous religious scientist G. Thibon (1903-1903) from a large number of her manuscripts and conversation records. These chapters that sparkle with spiritual light are permeated with Weil's profound thinking, showing Weil's great soul and lofty faith. They are a work that cannot be ignored in the history of Christian mysticism in the 20th century.
Simone Weil comes from expectation
Simone Weil "In Expectation"
is an outstanding female theologian in the 20th century and an otherworldly mystic. Weil is undoubtedly unique. This is not just because she is one of the few female theologians, nor is it just because she resolutely became a believer and a mystic in a society that emphasized science and progress and highlighted the process of secularization at the beginning of the 20th century. . What’s more, it’s because of her unique practice and experience of Christianity. As a Christian, she refused to be baptized and join the church, but insisted on persistently searching for and practicing the truth outside the visible church. As an intellectual, she took the initiative to identify with the workers, breathing and sharing their fate with the suffering people, so much so that she converted to religion after having a profound understanding after seeing the fishermen, their wives and children singing hymns. . As a mystic, she never passively retreated from the world and gave up her care for this world. After the fall of France, she actively joined the resistance organization, and later went to London to work, so that she finally died of poverty and illness. Provides a unique and moving commentary on the Christian faith. "
"Letter" No. 1 and No. 2 of "In Expectation": "Hesitation in the Face of Baptism", and later "Farewell Letter", and later added and selected "Letter to a Monk" "Faith", all focused on and discussed the distinction between the spirit of Christ and Christianity. Among them, these aspects are also covered in the selected "papers".
Tablet One:
"Tablet One" written on January 19, 1942 talks about
what God's will is, its aspects of expression, and how people can make themselves conform to God. will
Thoughts on the nature of the sacraments
The reason why I do not become a believer
I am most interested in thinking about the sacraments. Weil gave the following thoughts:
She believes that "Sacraments have a special mystical value because they contain a certain contact with God." "Sacraments as symbols and rituals also have a purely human value. In this respect, there is no essential difference between the sacraments and the songs, actions and slogans of certain political parties." However, she believes that most believers regard participating in the sacraments as mere symbols and rituals, including some who do not believe in the sacraments at all, and that a social feeling is equated with a religious feeling.
She believed that only those who were above a certain spiritual level could participate in the true sacraments, "and those who were below that level, as long as they had not yet reached it, no matter what they did, literally nothing Become a Christian." 5) Weil said that she was below this level and therefore unworthy of participating in the sacraments.
As for the reason why she did not become a Christian, Weil explained: she believed that she was not perfect or that her nature was contrary to God's will. She felt that it was not God's will for her to become a Christian now. She has a basic need, or instinct, to get into the midst of all different classes of people and become one of them as far as her conscience allows. Although she loved liturgy, religious songs, church architecture, and Catholic festivals, she did not love the church in any precise sense other than the things she loved above. She could build friendships with people, but not love for the church.
Letter Two:
Reflections on the Church.
Weil worries that the church exists as a social thing, "not only because of the filth of the church itself, but also because, among other characteristics, the church is a social thing." 6) She was afraid of church patriotism, which refers to the feeling of one's earthly homeland. And she thinks that she is a person who is extremely influenced by society, so she is afraid of being harmed by the church as a social thing. She specifically points out that the "society" she refers to is not something related to the city-state, but only refers to a collective feeling. Although the church is a social thing, it is owned by secular powerful people. As an institution that preserves and spreads the truth in secular society, it is possible that the good and the bad are similar and mixed under the cover of the same words.
She does not want to be accepted by a place, fall into the circle called "us" and become a member of "us". Although she knows the beauty of all this, she believes that she is destined to be alone. In any interpersonal environment, she is an outsider and alienated.
Letter 4:
Weil’s spiritual autobiography.
Several religious experiences are recounted.
On a Patron's Day, she came alone to a small village on the coast of Portugal. The fishermen's wives and children held candles and lined up around the fishing boats to hold religious ceremonies while singing ancient thanksgiving songs. The tune was so sad that it made people cry. Down. As a result, she believes that Christianity is the best religion for slaves, and she has considered herself a slave since she lived with workers in the factory for a year.
In 1937, when she entered the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, she felt for the first time in her life something involuntary forcing her to kneel to the ground.
In 1938, I stayed in Solem for ten days, from Palm Sunday*** to Easter Tuesday, and participated in all religious services. At that time, her headaches began to attack, "I often had splitting headaches; every sound of the church bells caused me pain like a beating on my head; I concentrated all my attention to gradually get rid of this miserable body and let him Huddled alone and suffering, I derived pure and perfect joy from the incomparable beauty of the hymns of song.” 7)
The recitation of a poem called "Love" by a British poet known as metaphysics in the seventeenth century has the effect of prayer. While reciting a hymn, she felt Christ himself coming.
However, she later expressed her views on "miracles" and also talked about her attitude towards mysticism.
She hates the miracles in the Gospels. For her, before the problem of discussing God is solved, it is impossible to predict the real contact between people on earth and between people and God. She felt the coming of Christ himself, without any participation of the senses or the imagination, but only in her suffering the coming of a certain love, which was like the smile on the face of a kindly person.
She herself had never read mystical works because she felt she had no need to.
About prayer.
She never prayed because, influenced by Pascal, she feared the revelatory power of prayer. Just recite the Lord's Prayer every morning. For Weil, the effect of memorizing scriptures is extraordinary. She said, "Sometimes, the first few verses make my thoughts float away from the body and take them to a place outside of space." , looking from there, it was a blur. The space opens up. The ordinary spatial infinity of the senses is replaced by an infinity of the second and sometimes third order. At the same time, between this infinity is a silence that is not soundless but is the object of an active feeling that is more positive than the feeling of sound. If there is any sound, it reaches me only after passing through this silence." 8)
Concerning the conflict between personal intellect and church doctrine.
Weil believes that intelligence is pure and strictly personal. Whenever intelligence can function without any obstacles in its own position, there will be "harmony". "Wherever intellect gains sway, there is extreme individualism. Wherever intelligence is in distress, there is one or more oppressive groups." 9) When the church wants love and intelligence to make the words of the church the norm, it commits the sin of abuse of power, a natural tendency of any group without exception.
Letter Six:
Final Thoughts.
In contact with loving God, the important thing is “contact” rather than “method of contact”. In the letter, he mentioned that Father Belan's shortcoming was his attachment to the church. The church is already a humane and warm environment and home. This attachment will anchor the bird to the earth as firmly as a thick iron chain. However, Weil believed that God's children had no other home on earth but the universe itself. There is nothing great about being a saint in this day and age. The new kind of holiness is everything in its place, everything in proportion. She felt that she was a reflection of the fruitless fig tree and was cowardly in nature.
Letter to a Monk
Point 14, citing St. The words of John: "Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God." 10) From this, then, whoever believes this, even if he does not participate in anything else affirmed by the Church, has true faith. And as time goes by, it seems that everything that happens is that people see not Jesus but the church as the incarnation of God on earth. The difference is this: Christ is perfect, while the Church is tainted by a vast amount of sin.
Point 25: Miracles are not “proof of faith.” Affirming Christian miracles, this conclusion is arbitrary, starting from the fact that miracles prove nothing but themselves, since they are a stamp of authenticity derived from without. The word quoted by Christ which is translated as "miracle" may equally well be translated as "successful enterprise", "excellent action".
The concept of miracle is a modern Western concept and is related to the scientific concept of the world. However, the two are incompatible. However, its connection with supernatural things cannot be denied. For example, a fact can be connected with supernatural things in three ways. Certain facts, for example, can be either things that arise from the body, or things that are acted upon by the devil's actions in the soul, or they are the result of God's actions. So when one weeps over physical pain, there is next to him another who weeps out of pure love at the thought of God. Although tears are the result of a psycho-physiological and mechanical activity, one of them is supernatural, the involvement of charity. So in this sense the miracles of the saints are supernatural.
On the other hand, by not clarifying the theory of satisfaction of the so-called miraculous acts, the Church would be leading many souls astray through errors arising from its apparent incompatibility between religion and science.
Finally, if miracles have the nature and meaning that people ascribe to them, the scarcity of miracles today might lead one to believe that the Church has little involvement with God anymore.
3.
One extreme that insists on the difference between the spirit of Christ and the Christian church is Gnosticism. Weil has similarities with the Gnostic spirit, but there are also fundamental differences.
Many Gnostics can be classified as spiritual aristocratic types. They seemed unable to accept Christianity as a religion for the common people and the community. Among Christians there are those who claim to have false righteousness, and there are Christian-proprietors - those who feel that they have a large domain in religious life; and there are also spiritual wanderers and wanderers who are hungry. For those who desire righteousness, they may be more justified; the Gnostics are disgusted with the secular church practices, but whether they are truly justified is another matter.
According to the Russian thinker Berdyaev, people have two types of mental structures. One type is possessed by most people in the collective and society, which has an external advantage in history; the other type is spiritual. An individual, an exceptional minority. And it can be said conditionally that one of these two types is "popular" and the other is "aristocratic"; in other words, the former is "spiritual" and accounts for a minority, while the latter is "carnal" and "spiritual". "flesh and blood", which accounts for the majority in quantity. He believes that there is a hidden truth: the collective, quantitative majority has always exploited, oppressed and coerced the qualitative minority in history, that is, those who are spiritual and love sacred things and long for the heavenly world; and history is For that kind of ordinary, popular people, created for the collective, the country, the family, the legal institution, the school, the order of daily life, and even the external organization of the church are all created for this kind of ordinary people. "Popular" people face the masses and create life for ordinary people and the collective. They may have great talents. This race has its own heroes, its own great men, its own geniuses and saints; while "aristocratic" people People face another world and create value that ordinary people do not need. They may not have talents. Their strength and talents may be lower than most people of the general public, but they have an organism that is oriented towards another spiritual-creative world. , this organism is more sensitive, complex and delicate than the indifferent masses. They are more "suffering" from the world than those who are oriented towards the people and the collective, and are suffering from the ugliness, vulgarity and despicability of the world. Even popular great men are cold and superficial, which protects them from the harm of the "world" that brings pain to the more complex and unadapted spiritual collectives. 11)
Gnostics are arrogant. In the eyes of Gnostics (especially the old Gnostics), the "spiritual" race is always far away from the "carnal" race; "Carnal" and "fleshly" people cannot ascend to the higher spiritual world and remain in the lower place forever. For these people, salvation is impossible. If the Gnostics were victorious, the Church would become an aristocratic sect. However, it also gave rise to various profound questions, and they are eternal questions that are still meaningful today. As Berdyaev asked: Should the form of Christian revelation addressed to the common people and accepted by mediocre flesh-and-blood organisms be recognized as absolute and eternal? Should the more spiritual man, the man with a more complex and sophisticated organism, the man with more intellectual faculties, cater to the mediocre? Should one lower one's spiritual standards for everyone, for the sake of conformity with all the Christian masses? Is it possible to equate catholicity (sobornost) with popular collectivity? Is the path to grace, the path to spiritual perfection, the path to holiness, the only measure of spirituality and the only source of religious knowledge?
Through Weil, we may be able to have a clearer understanding of these problems - not necessarily a solution. In this way, it will be clearer in our reflection on ourselves. Weil is a "spiritual" person. She truly understands the spirit of Christ. However, unlike the Gnostics, she does not have the arrogance of the Gnostics. She emphasizes "love" more. According to her understanding, the latter group of people should not be able to "escape" from the world. They have to bear the burden of the world and their beliefs and serve the general liberation and light of mankind. And those who think they belong to the advanced category and despise small people and are unwilling to help the world improve are disgusting; the source of evil is also spiritual, not entirely physical. There are natural grades of spiritual organisms and natural grades of spiritual gifts. Some people are more "spiritual" and some are more "carnal", but this does not mean that the former are more perfect and holy than the latter. On the contrary, they are more unfortunate in this world because they shoulder heavier responsibilities. , they are more tormented by internal contradictions, and it is more difficult for them to achieve inner integrity and the unity of the world around them. If you completely emphasize the spiritual side, you will lose focus and fall into a kind of ecstasy and mystery. Weil deeply emphasized that people should recognize the beauty of the world as God's "incarnation" (incarnation); emphasized the order of the world; emphasized human humility-in the last tablet, she said that she was a barren tree. The fig tree is cowardly in nature.
Weil only believes in the person she discovers through the reality of inner experience due to purely emotional proximity: she experiences "expectation of God," a faith gained through the experience of spiritual freedom. Her strongest desire in life was to get along with people in the worst situations and to penetrate into the working class. Weil believes:
In this world, only those who have been reduced to the lowest level of humiliation, even more humble than begging, who not only have no social status, but are also regarded as losing the most basic human dignity - reason, can only do this. It is actually possible for people to tell the truth. Everyone else is lying. 12)
They are like the madmen in Velazquez's paintings, with a bitter look in their eyes that possesses the truth but cannot communicate. Weil once asked herself whether she was mad, or, as Pascal put it, "another manifestation of madness." Since her claims were not effective, she regarded herself as a simple-minded person. However, the world of "pure, unmixed, radiant, profound, fundamental truth" seems to be open unobstructed only to "madmen" and to those who are like them.
For a person who embraces God with her whole heart, her whole life has been in the pure pursuit of truth. Because of her absolute requirements, she does not tolerate any worldly interference. This is a kind of Pride, however, when this kind of pride is integrated with society, it no longer has its original meaning, but an angel with extraordinary specialness.
The strict distinction between the Christian spirit and Christianity makes Weiyi's attitude towards God always "in expectation", thus foreshadowing the absolute cleanliness and purity of her spirit. Her actions proved that she was actually a great witness of the Christian spirit in the 20th century.
Starting from the spirit of Christ and the love of God, Weil's thought - according to Richard H. Bell13 - is based on the various sources of the pursuit of truth, guiding us to both exist within ourselves and Outside oneself, it maintains the tension between human order and the divine; guiding us to maintain a more passionate connection with "reality", and this "reality" must not ignore the spiritual significance.
As Weil herself said:
"For me personally, in the final analysis, life has never had any other meaning except the expectation of truth...". 14)
That’s all
Who plays the theologian Weil?
Simone Weiyi died of lung disease on the European battlefield at the age of 37. During his lifetime, he has been running to save lives and heal the wounded. His works include "Take Root" and "Burden and Divine Grace". Her thoughts are comparable to Nietzsche's. , who claimed to be an anti-Christian Christian throughout his life, was a rare philosopher, theologian and thinker with a strong sense of compassion for others!
The above is all the content about Simone Weil, Simone Weil's representative works, and the related content about Inevi. I hope it can help you.