“Anonymous Comments Header” <> wrote:

“It is not for man to seek, or even to believe in God. He has only to refuse to believe in everything that is not God. . . . A man has only to persist in his refusal, and one day or another God will come to him.”

—Simone Weil, On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God

A brilliant lady!

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From Simone Weil (pronounced Vey) “First And Last Notebooks” (Translated by Ricahrd Rees, Oxford University Press; London:1970)

p.177 It is wrong to say that God gives gratuitously and that he owes nothing to men. Having created us, he owes us everything.

p.194 Does not the custom of burial originate from the metaphor of the seed?

p.209 Propaganda is one-dimensional.

p. 212 Abel was the first dead man. Is not Abel the first incarnation of the Word? The first-born of the dead?

p.216 No victory, absolutely no victory, of evil can alter the fact that evil is still evil. …. But so long as evil is judged to be evil, the good has not been totally vanquished.

p.243 St John of the Cross says that the state of the dark night of the spirit, with its alternations, lasts longer the further the soul is destined to progress on the way to perfection.

p.250-251 [Re Abel] He whom God loves dies prematurely by a violent death, without issue. He whom God hates has a long life and a numerous posterity, and buil;ds a town. God did not prevent the man that He loved from being killed.

p.263 God’s great crime against us is to have created us, is the fact of our existence. And our existence is our great crime against God. When we forgive God for our existence, he forgives us for existing.

p.269 “With God all thiongs are possible” is, in itself, a meaningless phrase; it simply means that “all thgings are possible”, which is a thought absolutely void of content. The real meaning is: in the domain of the transcendent contradictories are possible.

pp. 272-273 Problem: why was it good to make a serpent of bronze and criminal to make a golden calf? … It was only hezekiah – 100 years before the capture of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar and 230 after the death of Solomon – who destroyed Moses’ serpent of bronze. Until then they had continued to burn incense to it.

p.300 God is the Good. He ius neither a thing nor a person nor a thought. But in order to grasp him we have to conceive him as a thing, a person and a thought.

p.320 Noah’s rainbow … is a mediation between heaven and earth, a way of salvation. The Tower of Babel was intended to be the same thing; but it started from the earth rather than the sky, and therefore it was wrong.

p.342 Truth which becomes life; this is the evidence of the Spirit. Truth transformed into life.

p.347 The object studied by science is God’s impersonal Providence.

p.349 God is the sole good. All the goods contained in things have their equivalent in God. God is the sole measure of value.

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Richard Rees “Simone Weil: A Sketch For a Portrait” Oxford University Press; London: 1966)

p.21 Remembering that Simone Weil defines oppression as being forced to woirk as a passive instrument of designs one neither understands nor even knows, it follows that a bureaucratic State is still an oppressive State, no matter how it raises the standard of living of its subjects.

p.56 [Quoting SW] The evil in us is finite, like ourselves. The good, with whose help we oppose it, is outside ourselves and is infinite.

p.82 [Quoting SW] If God should be an illusion from the point of view of existence, He is the sole reality from the point of view of the good. I know that for certain, because it is a definition. “God is the good” is as certain as “I am”.

p.145 [Quoting SW on Jacob] Isn’t it the greatest possible disaster, when you are wrestling with God, not to be beaten?

p.146 There is one thing which, I believe, the devil cannot do: inspire an artist to paint a picture which, if placed in the cell of a man condemned to strict solitary confinement, would still comnfort him after twenty years. Duration discriminates between the diabolic and the divine. …

To die for God is not proof of faith in God. To die for an unknown and repulsive convict who is a victim of injustice, that is proof of faith in God.

Jehovah made the same promises to Israel that the Devil made to Christ.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Simone Weil …. anarchist soldier. factory worker, labor organizer, school teacher, Christian, resistance fighter, philosopher. http://rivertext.com/weil.html

Also look at ……….. Dorothy L Sayers … forbidden to be part of the Inklings because of her gender …. a magnificent Christian writer. http://www.sayers.org.uk/

Elaine Pagels …. professor, Biblical scholar, feminist. http://www.roycecarlton.com/speakers/pagels.html

Karen Armstrong … ex-Catholic … Read her “The Gospel According to Woman” (1986) http://www.powells.com/authors/armstrong.html