Simone Weil and Theology

by A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone, Lucian Stone

Simone Weil - philosopher, religious thinker, mystic, social/political activist - is notoriously difficult to categorize, since her life and writings challenge traditional academic boundaries. As many scholars have recognized, she set out few, if any, systematic theories, especially when it came to religious ideas. In this book, A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone and Lucian Stone illuminate the ways in which Weil stands outside Western theological tradition by her use of paradox to resist the clamoring for greater degrees of certainty. Beyond a facile fallibilism, Simone Weil's ideas about the super-natural, love, Christianity, and spiritual action, and indeed, her seeming endorsement of a sort of atheism, detachment, foolishness, and passivity, begin to unravel old assumptions about what it is to encounter the divine.

Genres: Philosophy

250 pages, Paperback

First published December 30, 2012

Reviews

[Kenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun and accessible book on Weil. The notion of Weil's philosophy as an 'atheology' which initiates the book is all but abandoned by the end. I was also troubled by the authors' insistence that Weilienne 'attention' is in any sense radical - what's radical about it, what does it actually change? As a work of exegesis though, this book is exemplary, and the authors' incomplete visions of political resistance and atheology are no doubt a consequence of Weil's only partial meditations on effective political activism and on the role of atheism in her worldview.

[Bruce Prescott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recommended. A very helpful book. A few lines from Rozelle-Stone's discussion of "The impossible" in Weil's thought offers a succinct entry into the heart of Simone Weil's theology:

"The subject whose formation is initiated by the event of grace will, without the ordinary protective consolations in place, become highly dissatisfied by the forces at work in the social realm, including what is offered by politicians' rhetoric, or committees, or news analysts, or popular self-help prescriptions. The slogans and lies fail to ring true anymore, and they fail to amuse. She can no longer humor small talk, whose intention is to keep everyone comfortable. Nor is she content with condescending handouts or even pay raises when they are meant to supplant real justice. She can see behind the empty promises made to the afflicted, and see the ways in which they are being used as pawns by the powerful. Yet as stated previously, she is also prevented from desiring or seeking grace itself: 'The object of our search should not be the supernatural, Weil writes, 'but the world. The supernatural is light itself: if we make an object of it we lower it.' Thus, this subject does seek real and meaningful contact with the world, but the problem is that what is discovered as needed when she makes this contact departs so radically from what exists, or from what options are popularly prescribed, that her desires are labeled "impossible," or else, she lacks the language to articulate them. She becomes, she feels, like the idiot vagrant stammering before the magistrate who knows she will never be listened to." pp. 182-83.