Simone Weil

The great Marcionite dualist of the 20^th century has to be Simone Weil. We quote some of her words here -

     I have never been able to understand, how it is possible for a reasonable mind to regard the Jehovah of the Bible and the Father who is invoked in the Gospel as one and the same being. 

      She refused baptism into the Catholic church because ‘Roman Catholicism was too Jewish.’ She had ‘vainly sought for a Catholic priest who disavowed the God of Saul:’ ‘Do you know that if Saul is punished by the Eternal, it is not because he killed all the Amalekites, including the children and women who passed over the tip of his dagger, but because he killed all except one; he pardoned the king.

     The curse of Israel weighs upon Christianity. Atrocities, inquisition, extermination of heretics … that was Israel. Capitalism, that was Israel.

    The Jews – that handful of uprooted individuals – have been responsible for the uprooting of the whole terrestrial globe. The part they played in Christianity turned Christianity into something uprooted with respect to its own past…The Jews are the poison of uprooting personified.

      The church ‘owing to its historical origin, has been unable to purge itself of its Judaic element.’

      …But Israel had, nevertheless, to have some part in God. All that part in God that is possible without spirituality, without the supernatural (there can be no supernatural life without the Incarnation). Israel’s spirituality was exclusively collective. It is because of this ignorance, this darkness of understanding that it was the ‘chosen people.’ Thus it is possible to understand the words of Isaiah: ‘I have hardened their hearts so that they shall not understand my word.’

      It is for this reason that everything in Israel is contaminated with sin. 

      Solomon: Everything is of a polluted and atrocious character, as if designedly so, beginning with Abraham inclusive, right down through all his descendants (except in the case of some of the prophets: Daniel, Isaiah; and others???) = as though to indicate perfectly clearly: Beware! That way lies evil. A people chosen in order to be rendered blind, to be the executioner of Christ.

Here’s a longer and more obscure quote by her:

      God makes Moses and Joshua purely temporal promises, at a time when the Egyptians were intently concerned with the soul’s eternal salvation. The Hebrews, having rejected the Egyptian revelation, got the god they deserved – a carnal and collective God who never spoke to anyone’s soul, up to the time of the exile. (Unless in the Psalms…?) Among all the characters in the Old Testament accounts, Daniel’s is the only pure one (apart from Abel, Enoch, Noah, Melchisidek and Job). It is not surprising that a people composed of fugitive slaves, or rather the children of fugitive slaves, led forth to take possession by a series of massacres of a land whose soft climate and natural fertility gave it a paradise-like quality, and which had been organised on a flourishing basis by civilisations in whose labours they had taken no part, and which they proceeded to destroy – that such a people was unable to produce anything very good. This was certainly not the way to establish the reign of good on this little portion of earth. To speak of ‘God as educator’ in connection with this people is a heinous sort of joke.

      Is it surprising that there should be so much evil in a civilisation-our own-which is corrupted at its roots, in its very inspiration, by this atrocious lie? The curse of Israel weighs upon Christendom. The atrocities, the extermination of heretics and of unbelievers – all this was Israel. Capitalism was Israel –  (and is so still, up to a certain point…)

 But, there were some OT texts she did approve of -

    The beauty of the world was expressed in  - Isaiah, Job, Song of Solomon, Daniel, Tobias, parts of Ezekiel, Psalms, Book of Wisdom, beginning of Genesis.

We cannot agree with her judgement concerning the Book of Isaiah, which thunders with dreadful curses towards the Earth, moaning about everyone and everything: there can be no more racist tract in existence.

Again -

    Thus it (‘the beauty of the world’) inspired, in the Old Testament, the Book of job,.. most of the Psalms, the Song of songs, the sapiential books .. and what is called the ‘second Isaiah,’ and some of the minor prophets, and the books of Daniel and Tobias. Almost all the rest of the Old Testament is a tissue of horrors.  (to J.W., 1942, Letters p160)

     English-language books about Weil seek to deplore, apologise and cover-up this aspect of her work, for obvious reasons, whereas in fact it is the most important part. It would be good if someone could examine her French writings for a fuller exegesis instead of just the above scrappy notes.

      We’ve quoted how Simone Weil had ‘vainly sought for a Catholic priest’ who would express disapproval of the genocidal mass-murder as described by the  Saul/David story. 

      Instead, she only got to hear the wittering of theologians.