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Christianity and the Errors of Our Time: Simone Weil on Atheism and Idolatry1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 June 2011

Mario von der Ruhr
Mario von der Ruhr
Affiliation:
Swansea University
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Extract

In his 1985 book on philosophy and atheism, the Canadian thinker Kai Nielsen, a prolific writer on the subject, wonders why the philosophy of religion is ‘so boring’, and concludes that it must be ‘because the case for atheism is so strong that it is difficult to work up much enthusiasm for the topic.’ Indeed, Nielsen even regards most of the contemporary arguments for atheism as little more than ‘mopping up operations after the Enlightenment’ which, on the whole, add little to the socio-anthropological and socio-psychological accounts of religion provided by thinkers like Feuerbach, Marx and Freud, as any ‘reasonable person informed by modernity’ will readily acknowledge. On this view, the answer to Kant's question – ‘What may we hope?’ – does not gesture towards a resurrection and personal immortality, but instead to the death of religious discourse itself:

I think, and indeed hope, that God-talk, and religious discourse more generally, is, or at least should be, dying out in the West, or more generally in a world that has felt the force of a Weberian disenchantment of the world. This sense that religious convictions are no longer a live option is something which people who think of themselves as either modernists or post-modernists very often tend to have.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 68: Philosophy and Religion , July 2011 , pp. 203 - 226
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2011

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References

2 Nielsen, Kai, Philosophy and Atheism (New York: Prometheus, 1985), 224Google Scholar.

3 Nielsen, Philosophy and Atheism, 224.

4 Ibid. 224–225.

5 Kai Nielsen, ‘Can Anything be Beyond Human Understanding?’ in Tessin, Tim and von der Ruhr, Mario (eds.), Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious Belief (London: Macmillan, 1995), 179–180CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Nielsen, Kai and Phillips, D. Z., Wittgensteinian Fideism? (London: SCM Press, 2005), 31Google Scholar. (My emphasis).

7 Ibid.

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13 Cf. Davies, Brian, ‘Phillips on belief in God’, Philosophical Investigations 30.1 (July 2007), 219–244CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 229–230.

14 Phillips, D. Z., Death and Immortality (London: Macmillan, 1972), 49Google ScholarPubMed. For a critical assessment of Phillips' view, see von der Ruhr, Mario, ‘Theology, Philosophy, and Heresy: D. Z. Phillips and the Grammar of Religious Belief’, in ed. Sanders, Andy, D. Z. Phillips' Contemplative Philosophy of Religion (London: Ashgate, 2007), 55–75Google Scholar.

15 Nielsen and Phillips, Wittgensteinian Fideism?, 197.

16 Nielsen and Phillips, Wittgensteinian Fideism?, 31.

17 Ibid., 30.

18 For an excellent discussion of this dialogue and its aftermath, see Bullivant, Stephen, ‘From “Main Tendue” to Vatican II: The Catholic Engagement with Atheism 1936–1965’, in New Blackfriars 90.1026 (March, 2009): 178–188CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Weil, Simone, Gravity and Grace, tr. Craufurd, Emma and von der Ruhr, Mario (London: Routledge, 2002)Google Scholar (references indicated by GG), 115

20 GG, 162.

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27 Weil, Simone, Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks (London: Routledge, 1988)Google Scholar (references indicated by IC), 151. See also, NR, 118.

28 Weil, Simone, First and Last Notebooks, ed. and tr. Rees, Richard (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970)Google Scholar (references indicated by FLN), 295.

29 SE, 47.

30 ‘There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God’.(GG, 114).

31 Weil, Simone, Notebooks, 2 vols., tr. Wills, Arthur (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956)Google Scholar (references indicated by NB) vol. 1, 144.

32 GG, 173–174.

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34 NR, 236.

35 Félix Le Dantec, Athéisme (Paris: Flammarion, 1907). The following remark is characteristic of Dantec's outlook: ‘Je crois à l'avenir de la Science: je crois que la Science et la Science seule résoudra toutes les questions qui ont un sens; je crois qu'elle pénétrera jusqu'aux arcanes de notre vie sentimentale et qu'elle m'expliquera même l'origine et la structure du mysticisme héréditaire anti-scientifique qui cohabite chez moi avec le scientisme le plus absolu. Mais je suis convaincu aussi que les hommes se posent bien des questions qui ne signifient rien. Ces questions, la Science montrera leur absurdité en n'y répondant pas, ce qui prouvera qu'elles ne comportent pas de réponse.’ Quoted at http://agora.qc.ca/mot.nsf/Dossiers/Scientisme (Accessed on 18 Feb 2009).

36 FLN, 308. (My emphasis.)

37 WG, 45.

38 WG, 54.

39 WG, 95.

40 NR, 115. Op. cit., For a different interpretation of Richelieu's motivations, see D. P. O'Connelli, Richelieu (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968). Among other things, the author argues that, contrary to appearances, ‘Richelieu's policy was not so much to make the Church a department of the state, as to make France a theocracy, with the church interlocked with the state and permeating secular activity with its moral authority’ (139). Weil would certainly have applauded such a permeation of the secular with the religious, though she would probably not find O'Connelli's reading entirely convincing.

41 SE, 197.

42 Weil, Simone, Letter to a Priest, tr. Wills, A. F., with an introduction by Mario von der Ruhr (London: Routledge, 2002)Google Scholar (references indicated by LP), 18.

43 LP, 17.

44 LP, 18.

45 LP, 19.

46 SE, 197.

47 NB, Vol. 1, 55.

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52 Padfield, Peter, Himmler: Reichsführer – SS (London: Mcmillan, 1990), 3Google Scholar. Entry in Himmler's diary, dated 15.12.1919.

53 Ibid., 176.

54 Padfield, Himmler: Reichsführer – SS, 351.

55 Ibid., 172.

56 Ibid., 172.

57 Ibid., 172.

58 Padfield, Himmler: Reichsführer – SS, 174.

59 Ibid., 175.

60 NR, 273.

61 NR, 180–181. See also, FLN, 161.

62 SE, 197.

63 NR, 266.

64 GG, 114.

65 Weil, Simone, Oppression and Liberty, tr. Wills, Arthur and Petrie, John (London: Routledge, 2002)Google Scholar (references indicated by OL), 168.

66 NR, 266.

67 IC, 184.

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69 WG, 73.

70 WG, 129.

71 WG, 128.

72 James Woelfel, Albert Camus on the Sacred and the Secular (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987), 25.

73 Ibid., 27.

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77 GG, 115. (My emphasis)

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84 Benedict XVI, Saved in Hope (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008)Google Scholar, 90.

85 Ibid., 92.

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87 LP, 34

88 Woelfel, Albert Camus on the Sacred and the Secular, 18.