Love in the Void
Where God Finds Us
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this intellectually and spiritually demanding sampler, philosopher and Christian mystic Weil (1909 1943) addresses love, beauty, suffering, and idolatry. Weil 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. Gagne's introduction explains the context of the pieces, but she largely refrains from analyzing Weil's often inscrutable prose: "She leaves us with no simple answers, but her encounter with God's love can leave us filled with wonder and hope." Though Weil's writing can be hard to parse and harder to fathom, palatable sound bites dot her work: "The intelligence only grows and bears fruit in joy"; "Christ does not call his benefactors loving or charitable. He calls them just." Weil combines aphorisms and perceptive observations to lead readers into "the void," "the dark night," where suffering, writes Weil, "puts a little seed in us" and inspires questions about the afterlife. This beguiling book is a fine introduction to Weil's work.
