Possibility and necessity are terms opposed to justice … Possible means all that the strong can impose upon the weak. It is reasonable to examine how far this possibility goes. Supposing it to be known, it is certain that the strong will accomplish his purpose to the extreme limit of possibility. It is a mechanical necessity.
Adriana Cavaero, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence
It is because it can be loved by us, it is because it is beautiful, that the universe is a country. It is our only country here below. This thought is the essence of the wisdom of the Stoics. We have a heavenly country, but in a sense it is too difficult to love, because we do not know it; above all, in a sense, it is too easy to love, because we can imagine it as we please. We run the risk of loving a fiction under this name. If the love of the fiction is strong enough it makes all virtue easy, but at the same time of little value. Let us love the country of here below. It is real; it offers resistance to love. It is this country that God has given us to love. He has willed that it should be difficult yet possible to love it.
Simone Weil, Waiting for God, 171-172
“When a man turns away from God, he simply gives himself up to the law of gravity. Then he thinks that he can decide and choose, but he is only a thing, a stone that falls.”
“All encounter begins with a benediction, contained in the word ‘hello’; that ‘hello’ that all cogito, all reflection on oneself already presupposes and that would be a first transcendence. This greeting addressed to the other man is an invocation. I therefore insist on the primacy of the well-intentioned relation toward the other. Even when there may be ill will on the other’s part, the attention, the receiving of the other, like his recognition, mark the priority of good in relation to evil.”
simone weil, waiting for god, 445
Simone Weil, Gateway to God
Claire Wolfteich, “Attention or Destruction: Simone Weil and the Paradox of the Eucharist,” The Journal of Religion 81, no. 3 (Jul., 2001)
“[Jesus’ parables] are “a language which from beginning to end, thinks through the
Metaphor and never beyond…there is more in the parables taken
together than in any conceptual system about God. We are, in the Parables taken as a whole,
given much more to think through than the coherence of any concept offers…[We can] draw from the Parables nearly all the kinds of theologies which have divided Christianity
through the centuries … and taken all together, they say more than any rational theology…They give rise to thought [but cannot be reduced to] theological simplifications which we attempt to put in their place.”
“In Saïs, the statue of Athena, whom they equate with Isis, bore the inscription: ‘I am all that has been, and is, and shall be; no mortal has yet raised my veil.’
—Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris, § 9 (354 C).
“Christ did not hide truths in order to prevent them from being communicated, but in order to provoke desire for them by this very concealment.”
—Saint Augustine: Sermons, 51, 4, 5.
“The more these things seem to be obscured by figurative words, the sweeter they become when they are explained.”
—Saint Augustine: On Christian Doctrine, iv, vii, 15.
“But in order that manifest truths should not become tiring, they have been covered with a veil, while remaining unchanged, and thus they become the object of desire; being desired, they are in a way made young again; with their youth restored, they enter the spirit gently.”
—Saint Augustine: Letters, 137, V, 18.
“The plain fact is that not
all facts are plain…’The Lord whose oracle is at Delphi,’ said Heraclitus referring to Apollo the god
and symbol of wisdom, ‘neither speaks nor conceals but gives signs.’… There are
meanings of high, sometimes of very high importance, which cannot be stated in
terms strictly defined….Plain speech may sometimes have conceptual exactitude,
but it will be inaccurate with respect to the new thing that one wants to say, the
freshly imagined experience that one wants to describe and communicate.”
— Philip Wheelwright, The Burning Fountain: A Study in the Language of Symbolism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), p. 86.
“These things are veiled in figures, in garments as it were, in order that they may exercise the mind of the pious inquirer, and not become cheap for being bare and obvious … For being remote, they are more ardently desired, and for being desired they are more joyfully discovered.”
—Saint Augustine: Against Lying, X, 24.
“Vielleicht ist nie etwas Erhabeneres gesagt oder eine Gedanke erhabener ausgedrückt worden als in jener Aufschrift über dem Tempel der Isis (der Mutter Natur): ‘Ich bin alles was da ist, was da war und was da sein wird, und meinen Schleier hat kein Sterblicher aufgedeckt.’”
“[Perhaps nothing more sublime has ever been said or a thought has been expressed more sublimely, than in that inscription on the temple of Isis (Mother Nature): ‘I am all that is, that has been, and that shall be, and no mortal has raised my veil.’]”
—Immanuel Kant: Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790. (§ 49, footnote.)
Little Bristling Soul 