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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Interlude: Cuttin' Ron

I am being urged elsewhere to turn my audio-visual attention to YouTube clips of that malt shop cowboy, Ronald Reagan. Sorry, boys. Been there. Done that. Wouldn’t be prudent. Not gunna do it. It’s a nightmare best forgotten, though I vaguely remember a kind of greenish-orange pompadour, floating like a greasy cloud above an empty suit. In my nightmare, there were mobs of large, grinning men in tobacco-stained bib overalls and John Deere baseball caps, stomping their big, flat, shit-caked feet and making crude sounds like the bellowing of barnyard animals, as a mellow, reassuring voice carefully enunciated “There you go again…” You could almost smell the manure. Off in the distance, to the south, a repetitive cha-ching! cha-ching! drowned out the heart-wrenching screams of dying nuns. To the east, in the direction of Mecca, bearded Ayatollahs passed out their windfall Yanqui dollars to terrorist chieftains, while back down in Banana-land, strutting bean-fed and tassel-festooned colonels deployed jackbooted death squads to do the bidding of Grandees with lifetime passes to the White House. No-no-no-no. YouTube. Me no Tube. Homey don't play dat.

On a more positive note, I’m reading a collection of essays entitled Faith and Philosophy, edited by Alvin Plantinga. The one I’m currently working my way through is “The Ethics of Jonathan Edwards”, authored by Henry Stob. The name Jonathan Edwards has formerly brought to mind brilliant sermons of the hellfire and brimstone variety. I knew, of course, that he was a Puritan preacher—the greatest sermonizer that America ever produced. What I hadn’t realized is that Jonathan Edwards was also a world-class theologian whose writings on religious philosophy rival anything produced in Europe. This essay on Edwards has also taught me something about the role of Calvinism in the genesis of that characteristic optimism for which America is famous, and of which the play-acting piety of Cowboy Ron was but a Thespian echo. Here’s Stob on Edwards:

Behind the human society Edwards discerned the divine. Existing unchangeable in the eternal heavens he saw a goodness of which every earthly good was but the shadow and witness. Behind the society of men stood God, the absolute standard for all relationships between beings. The rules of right, the laws of conduct, and the principles of spiritual intercourse are not, he saw, provincialisms of this planet. They reign beyond the stars. Their seat and fountain is in God himself. Here lies the root of optimism. Whatever else the Puritan philosophy of life may have been it was neither petty nor pessimistic. The Puritan strode two worlds like a Colossus. He lived under the controlling conviction that the moral life had its source and issue in the eternal, and he was unafraid.

Yeah. That’s the real deal.