Abstract
In her “Letter to a Priest,” Simone Weil makes the following, typically bold, assertion concerning belief in the Resurrection: “Hitler could die and return to life again fifty times, but I should still not look upon him as the Son of God. And if the gospel omitted all mention of Christ’s Resurrection, faith would be easier for me. The Cross by itself suffices me.”1 This statement has often served as an indication that Weil’s version of Christian mysticism has no place for the Resurrection. Throughout the collection of short essays, articles, and notebooks produced at the end of her life Weil reflects frequently, in profound and intriguing ways, on the significance of death, its effect on human thought, and its place in moral and spiritual life. Not only is death “the source of all untruth and of all truth for men,”2 the crucifixion of Christ becomes the center not only of her spirituality, but also of her metaphysics; creation, for Weil, is the cross that crucifies God.3 In some of the more extreme formulations scattered through the notebooks, in particular, Weil gives that impression that she sees life as a cosmic mistake that it is the task of spiritual life to rectify, through acceptance of death: “Birth involves us in the original sin, death redeems us from it.”4 Death is the humiliating destiny of all finite creatures, but if one can refuse the various compulsive ways there are of evading the thought of this, and consent to, or even love this necessity, one thereby participates in the process of “decreation,” the eradication of the autonomous self.
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Notes
Simone Weil, Gateway to God, ed. David Raper (Glasgow: Fontana, 1974), 129.
Simone Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil, trans. Arthur Wills (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956), 166.
Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks, trans. Richard Rees (London: Oxford University Press, 1970).70.
See Phillipa Foot’s essay on Nietzsche’s “revaluation of values” on this simple but important point in Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1978), 81–95
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Routledge, 1999), 10. Where possible I have tried to provide references to Gravity and Grace rather than the notebooks for ease of reference.
For more detailed discussions of Weil’s use of the term “void,” see Miklos Veto, The Religious Metaphysics of Simone Weil, Trans. Joan Dargon (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), Chapter 3;
A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone and Lucian Stone, Simone Weil and Theology (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), Chapter 3;
and Lissa McCullough, “The Void: Simone Weil’s Naming of Evil,” in Wrestling with God and with Evil: Philosophical Reflections, ed. Hendrik M. Vroom (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 22–42.
Eric Springsted, Simone Weil and the Suffering of Love (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1986), 41.
See Eric O. Springsted’s “Mystery and Philosophy” in The Relevance of the Radical, ed. A. Rebecca Stone and Lucian Stone (London: Continuum, 2010) for a good summary of Weil’s thought on this issue.
André Devaux, “On the Use of Contradiction in Simone Weil,” in Simone Weil’s Philosophy of Culture, Readings towards a Divine Humanity, ed. Richard H. Bell (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1993), 151–152
I am indebted, here, to Rush Rhees’s discussion of Weil’s use of the term “obedience” to describe the necessities of the natural world. Although the problem he raises is thematically different, the criticism has a similar—Wittgensteinian—form to the one I put forward here. See Rush Rhees, Discussions of Simone Weil, ed. D. Z. Philips, ass. Mario von der Ruhr (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), 57–58.
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© 2015 Thomas Cattoi and Christopher M. Moreman
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Jesson, S. (2015). Traces of Resurrection: The Pattern of Simone Weil’s Mysticism. In: Cattoi, T., Moreman, C.M. (eds) Death, Dying, and Mysticism. Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137472083_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137472083_4
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