Friday, February 3, 2023

It is the 3rd of February 2023 Welcome to the Christian History Almanac brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org, I’m Dan van Voorhis.

In the modern world, to be dismissed as a “mystic” usually means one of two things. In the secular world, “mystic” is synonymous with “dreamer” or a kind of spiritual idealist. In the Christian world, a “mystic” is usually a term for someone deemed a kind of fanatic or individualist. The term is used for the eccentric and often for women.

It was on this, the 3rd of February in 1909, that one such woman was born- Simone Weil. A note on pronunciation: you may hear it rhyme with “day” or “pail,”- But whether you anglicize a word or name from a foreign language is often a matter of custom or your own pleasure.

Simone was born into a well-to-do secular Jewish family in Paris. She and her brother went to the best schools- ended up at the École Normale and her brother, Andre, would be a math prodigy after whom a school would develop. Simone was, from an early age, a bit precocious and deeply feeling.

At 6, when she learned that the French soldiers on the front did not receive sugar, she refused to use any sugar herself. By the time she entered the École Normale in 1928, her philosophical interests had been piqued. Through 1930 she worked on her dissertation on Descartes and then began teaching at various schools.

But she was a radical idealist, at least because she felt extreme guilt and needed to think and live consistently. This would lead her to leave her teaching job to work in a Parisian auto parts factory. How could she write and think about the poor without actually being one of them?

She would move to Germany to try and understand the nascent Nazism amongst the working class. She then joined the anti-fascist fighting Franco in the Spanish Civil War. It was after an injury in training that she was traveling through Assisi when she had one of her earliest mystical experiences. She was “compelled to her knees” to pray in St. Francis’ old chapel. A later experience would reveal Christ to her- she had come to find in him the answer to her deeply personal philosophical problems. She prayed and recited George Herbert’s poem “Love.” She wrote, “Christ himself came down and took possession of me.” 

In her thought, true knowledge comes in affliction, beauty, and compassion. she thought the incarnation was the answer to the riddle of God being with us.

In her Gravity and Grace- a kind of notebook composed of her various thoughts and published posthumously by her friends she notes that the chasm between a possible God and creation is too vast. It can only be in humiliation- an emptying of God- could he have compassion on his creation. This had been a problem for Simone when she dealt with the greeks and the problem of enfleshment. This was the way of God in Jesus. Just as she bellied, she couldn’t know the worker's plight without being one herself, so too did Jesus enter the world.

When the Nazis occupied France, she moved to the south to work as a farmer. After that, she joined her parents in New York before moving to London to work with the French Resistance there.

Gravity and Grace is perhaps her best-known work of theology, and “The Need for Roots” is her most popular political work. Her politics were one of neither blind allegiance to the left or the right. She believed the way of Jesus precluded any particular political system but was involved in paying “attention to” (an important phrase in her work) people and their needs. Itself was a kind of imitation of Christ in which you don’t pity for its own sake but empty yourself for the other.

When working with the French resistance in London, she would only consume what the French back home could. She was already seriously underweight, which would exacerbate her other health concerns. She would be sent to the sanitarium, where she died of tuberculosis and self-starvation in 1943 at the age of 34.  

Philosopher Andre Gide called her the “most spiritual writer of the century” and “the patron saint of outsiders.” Albert Camus called her “the only great spirit of our age,” and T.S. Eliot said of Simone Weil that she was “a great soul and brilliant mind,” “a woman of genius, of a kind of genius akin to that of the saints.”. Simone Weil was born on this the 3rd of February in 1909.

The last word for today comes from Simone Weil herself- two quotations if you will indulge me: She wrote “that I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.” and from her Grace and Gravity: 

“All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.”

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 3rd of February 2023 brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

The show is produced by a man who considered school at the eek-coal nore-maal but was turned off by how they pronounced it. He is Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by a man who knows that Beckett’s Waiting For Godot is based on Waiting For God by Weil, and Waiting For Guffman is a hilarious take on them both. I’m Dan van Voorhis.

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.