Reflections: It's Not What You Think

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In my on-going effort to stir up interest in the thought of Simone Weil, I have begun posting selected examples of her aphoristic writings to my Twitter page on a daily basis.

One of the first volumes of Weil’s writings that I read several years back was First and Last Notebooks. As this book is rare and much too expensive for me to purchase, I later borrowed it a second time from the university library and took extensive notes on its contents. It is from these notes that I’ve been gleaning those lines that I’ve been posting on Twitter. Following below is one recent example:

The imagination works incessantly to block up the tiniest cracks through which grace might enter.

I also recently did a computer search of the library’s catalog for “Simone Weil.” One of the titles this search turned up was a book of philosophical essays, Trajectories of Mysticism in Theory and Literature, which included an essay on Weil authored by one James Winchell and titled “Semantics of the Unspeakable: Six Sentences by Simone Weil”. This sounded interesting, so I borrowed it.

As it turns out, I don’t much care for the piece on Weil: it’s too technical for the likes of me. I have found much in the book that I do like, however. For instance, in another essay, while explaining the influence of theologian Jonathan Edwards on the poetry of Emily Dickinson, the author provides the following excerpts from Edwards’ “A Divine and Supernatural Light”:

The spiritual and divine light does not consist in any impression made upon the imagination. It is no impression upon the mind, as though one saw any thing with the bodily eyes; it is no imagination or idea of an outward light or glory or any beauty of form or countenance, or a visible luster or brightness of any object. The imagination may be strongly impressed by such things; but this is not spiritual light.

[…]

Natural men may have lively impressions on their imagination; and we cannot determine but the devil, who transforms himself into an angel of light, may cause imaginations of an outward beauty, or visible glory, and of sounds and speeches, and other such things; but these are things of vastly inferior nature to spiritual light.

Both Weil and Edwards present the reader (and prospective spiritual pilgrim) with a strong warning concerning the imagination. Simone Weil describes the imagination as blocking grace and thereby absenting it from the careless and inattentive soul. Edwards writes of imagination as distinct from the ultimate reality of the divine light, adding a strong caveat against the danger of delusion due to the imagination’s capacity to blind one with dazzling bullshit of great beauty.

Distrust the pontificating poet equally as you would the posturing pole dancer.
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