Subtotal: $
Checkout
Simone Weil, the great mystic and philosopher for our age, shows where anyone can find God.
Why is it that Simone Weil, with her short, troubled life and confounding insights into faith and doubt, continues to speak to today’s spiritual seekers? Was it her social radicalism, which led her to renounce privilege? Her ambivalence toward institutional religion? Her combination of philosophical rigor with the ardor of a mystic?
Albert Camus called Simone Weil “the only great spirit of our time.” André Gide found her “the most truly spiritual writer of this century.” Her intense life and profound writings have influenced people as diverse as T. S. Eliot, Charles De Gaulle, Pope Paul VI, and Adrienne Rich.
The body of work she left – most of it published posthumously – is the fruit of an anguished but ultimately luminous spiritual journey.
After her untimely death at age thirty-four, Simone Weil quickly achieved legendary status among a whole generation of thinkers. Her radical idealism offered a corrective to consumer culture. But more importantly, she pointed the way, especially for those outside institutional religion, to encounter the love of God – in love to neighbor, love of beauty, and even in suffering.
View Table of ContentsThe lucidity of Simone Weil's mind in this text is rich as it addresses love, beauty, injustice and inequality, suffering, idolatry, and virtue. These meditations are more than mere instruction but a sublime wrestling of spiritual and intellectual honesty… Weil offers no easy or simplistic answers. Yet for those who have never read her, this book is a great introduction.
In this spiritually rich and philosophically deep collection of essays, Simon Weil offers us reflections on a range of topics -- love, beauty, suffering and idolatry. Weil is sadly unknown by large portions of the Christian world. She studied and taught philosophy in Le Puy-en-Velay, France, where she was also politically active, writing for union movements and the anarchists during the Spanish Civil War. The introductory essay in this collection is invaluable for understanding the context of the reflections that compose the bulk of Love in the Void. My favorite Weil essay will always be "The Love of God and Affliction". To find it included here enriches the volume as a whole. But every reader will find much here.
