Red Tory, Red Virgin Quotes

“...the sacramentality of the tragic in a poet like Gerard Manley Hopkins or a depressive like Logan Runnalls:

In his critique of disability studies, Logan holds the Weilian tension as his own confession:

'What I understand (in my vague way) disability studies to be doing is erasing the tension we find in life. I'm not comfortable thinking of my depression as in the realms of good or unflawed. And yet I now believe that this is a really important way that I bear the image of Christ. I too am a 'man of sorrows.' I do not want to get rid of the tension between depression as flaw and depression as way of bearing the image of God. Nor do I see any reason to be compelled to. To do so is to give up on loving the Other and settling for a weak justice.'

Runnalls' tension is perfect commentary for Weil's amor fati and George Grant's theodicy of the Cross. His consent to God and to the reality of his depression becomes a means of grace in this world—or light in the cave.”
― Bradley Jersak, Red Tory, Red Virgin: Essays on Simone Weil and George P. Grant

“Accepting God's consent for the world to exist as it does negates Pentecostal triumphalism, providential micro-management, and its secular counterpart in progressivist optimism. But, [...] I can consent to and welcome the seeds of God's grace into the world through my life via surrender. And because I have an idea of what those seeds might be (supernatural love), I might also have clues about the fruit they might produce. The trick is that consent requires openness and surrender, quite the opposite to my habitual striving and intercessory manipulation.”
― Bradley Jersak, Red Tory, Red Virgin: Essays on Simone Weil and George P. Grant

“First, God consents for the world to exist as it does, including evils experienced through the gravity of natural law and the willfulness of semi-free people. Somehow, consenting to such a universe (without endorsing the particulars) is also God's will. Second, I too must consent for the world to exist as it does, including the evils experienced through the gravity of natural law and the willfulness of semi-free people. The Stoics, Nietzsche, and Weil all call this amor fati. The recovery community calls it acceptance. Theologians of the Cross say, 'It is what it is.”
― Bradley Jersak, Red Tory, Red Virgin: Essays on Simone Weil and George P. Grant

“At some point, one would expect Christocentric believers like Weil and Grant to bow to Jesus' theology of God the Redeemer. We might ask whether the real offence for Grant and Weil was not also God's lack of intervention in their time. Where was the God 'who is able to deliver' for the Jews of Europe now? Had Yahweh evaporated in Hitler's ovens? To their credit, they looked for God in God's perceived absence, as the crucified Christ suffering with the afflicted once again. But is that really the final hope of the Jewish or Christian God? Grant and Weil were prejudiced against identifying God with victory (even in the resurrection) because they saw how triumphalism served the propaganda of empires. But in so doing, they are forerunners in idealizing 'the weakness of God' (a la Dietrich Bonhoeffer to John Caputo). But does such an impotent deity deserve the 'God' label? [Hence Caputo's denial of divine ontology…] In what sense does this God 'care'? How can their God be called 'Saviour'? Can such a God even be said to exist? Thus, S. A. Taubes dubs Weil's theology 'religious atheism.'

Taubes surely overstates her case—for Weil faithfully extends the agnostic theology of the apophatic mystics (Simeon the New Theologian, 949-1042) and St. John of the Cross (1542-1591). Yes, her God is absent in the sense of intervention or providence, but very much present in the supernatural compassion of His people:

'God is absent from the world except in the existence in this world of those in whom His love is alive. …Their compassion is the visible presence of God here below. …Through compassion we can put the created, temporal part of a creature in communication with God. …Compassion is what spans the abyss which creation has open between God and the creature. It is the rainbow.”
― Bradley Jersak, Red Tory, Red Virgin: Essays on Simone Weil and George P. Grant

“Weil supplants these contradictory images of God (the omnipotent willing God versus the good and loving God) with her version of Plato's dual causality. The real dilemma, for Weil, is that God is simultaneously the author of all that is and only that which is good. Her solution is to transpose Plato's dual causality of Reason and Necessity (Timaeus 48a) into two faces of God: (i) love or grace, as God the Son, the eternal self-renouncing sacrificial Lamb and (ii) necessity or gravity, as God the Father's created order of mechanical secondary causes. The distance between necessity and the Good in Plato thus becomes the distance between God the Father and God the Son in Weil, bridged by the Cross.

She then offers this hermeneutical key: 'power' is always a metaphor for necessity or natural and supernatural consequences rather than a direct act of miraculous intervention. Thus, the 'power of God' (whether in wrath or deliverance) in the Bible is an existential description of secondary causes. The reality, she says, is that God is impartial (i.e., 'God causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust' or 'Zeus's golden scales' ). 'Force' as we experience it is the mechanism (necessity) of the world (like gravity )—not arbitrary intervention. Beyond that, force is evil, because it is the opposite of love, which is consent.”
― Bradley Jersak, Red Tory, Red Virgin: Essays on Simone Weil and George P. Grant

“The more Christocentric one's theology, the more offensive this OT punisher-god appears—and if we are honest, he does appear. If, as the NT insists, the true God is exactly like Jesus, and always has been (Mal 3:6; Heb 13:8), then what has the Father-God of Jesus to do with Joshua or Samuel's Warrior God (1 Sam 15), demanding the extermination or enslavement of whole races? Thus, Weil draws a stark boundary between Jehovah's power and Jesus' refusal of power:

Jehovah made the same promises to Israel that the Devil made to Christ. God is only all-powerful here below for saving those who desire to be saved by Him. He has abandoned all the rest of his power to the Prince of this world and to inert matter. He has no power other than spiritual.”
― Bradley Jersak, Red Tory, Red Virgin: Essays on Simone Weil and George P. Grant

“The God of grace and mercy abdicates omnipotent force15 and takes the form of a suffering servant who loves even his enemies.”
― Bradley Jersak, Red Tory, Red Virgin: Essays on Simone Weil and George P. Grant

“Everything is permissible to him who is able to do everything. He who serves an All-powerful Being can do all in and through him. Force sets one free form the pair of opposites Good-Evil.11”
― Bradley Jersak, Red Tory, Red Virgin: Essays on Simone Weil and George P. Grant

“God is only all-powerful indirectly, abdicating his will to necessity.”
― Bradley Jersak, Red Tory, Red Virgin: Essays on Simone Weil and George P. Grant

“To [Simone] Weil, the NT unequivocally represents Christ crucified as the perfect and complete image of the invisible God —God is (re)defined as a gracious and forgiving Father, a hidden Father who rewards in secret (Matt 6:6). This Good God combines the universal and the particular in the harmony of incarnation through a righteous young Jew who shows us supernatural love and humility on a Cross. The God of grace and mercy abdicates omnipotent force and takes the form of a suffering servant who loves even his enemies. (p. 37)”
― Bradley Jersak, Red Tory, Red Virgin: Essays on Simone Weil and George P. Grant

“Weil regarded 'the willing God" as a self-justifying conception of totalitarian societies. The codeword she uses for social idolatry is 'the Great Beast,' described by Plato in The Republic Book VI and picked up in John's Apocalypse. She names it wherever she sees it, from ancient Israel and Rome to modern Marxism and America. She believed that Israel (the religious beast) and Rome (the materialist beast) corrupted Christianity with the spirit of the Beast when it was adopted as the official state religion. Thus, the (Catholic) Church came to worship the Beast as an 'ersatz form of God' and so became the totalitarian Beast herself. Through the doctrine of providence, the Church would purport to be a history-maker in the name of this (false) God. The serve of the false God (of the Social Beast in whatever form it may be) purifies evil by eliminating the horror of it. Nothing seems…evil to him who serves the false God, except lapses in the performance of his service. …Whilst one has a horror of this evil, at the same time one loves it as emanating from the will of God. …Everything is permissible to him who is able to do everything. He who serves an All-powerful Being can do all in and through him. Force sets one free from the pair of opposites Good-Evil. (p. 37)”
― Bradley Jersak, Red Tory, Red Virgin: Essays on Simone Weil and George P. Grant