From the Itching Footnotes Blog: 'That troubling mystic Simone Weil wrote in Gravity and Grace:
“We experience good only by doing it. We experience evil only by refusing to allow ourselves to do it, or, if we did it, by repenting of it.” As with so many of her gnomic sayings, I am not entirely sure what she meant by that. But I think it means that the aesthete’s and decadent’s life “beyond good and evil” is, in fact, a delusion; it is the embrace of evil as good. We experience good only by doing good, but we do not experience evil by doing evil, for in doing evil we make evil our good. The result is not life “beyond good and evil”; the result is the triumph of evil–a triumph more total because evil is not recognized as such. (As I Lay Dying: Meditations Upon Return, 25)'
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I am glad he prefaced Weil's name with 'troubling'. Personally, I was drawn to her writings and its crystalline clarity and depth, but her self-destruction bent was dark. She could not release her being to Christ, although she attempted it.
Lea Ann Payne's work is brought to mind here by his inclusion of this passage. Her pastoral ministry has been concerned with the increasingly gnostic and Jungian inroads into Christianity and the devastating effects the inroads have brought to clergy and laity alike.
It has taken me my whole life to even begin the differentiation needed to distance my being's structure from these two ways of approaching the symbolic of our souls. These inroads are much more dangerous for the soul and spirit than most people will ever know.
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Weil's intensity and depth, albeit at times creepy and delusional, did focus light on things most people would never even consider. Her gnostic Existentialism, however, endlessly self-absorbed, gripped her mind, soul and heart to the extreme.
Lea Ann Payne's work is brought to mind here by his inclusion of this passage. Her pastoral ministry has been concerned with the increasingly gnostic and Jungian inroads into Christianity and the devastating effects the inroads have brought to clergy and laity alike.
(Reference: “Renouncing False Gods and Appropriating the Holy” By Lea Ann Payne
It has taken me my whole life to even begin the differentiation needed to distance my being's structure from these two ways of approaching the symbolic of our souls. These inroads are much more dangerous for the soul and spirit than most people will ever know.
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Weil's intensity and depth, albeit at times creepy and delusional, did focus light on things most people would never even consider. Her gnostic Existentialism, however, endlessly self-absorbed, gripped her mind, soul and heart to the extreme.
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