Simone Weil (1909–1943),

a French philosopher.

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Today’s sharing from the Blue House of Via-HYGEIA, is our sampler-Part VI, dedicated to the French Philosopher Simone Weil, and it is about ‘The (Roman) Empire’. Our texts source is from ‘La Source Grecque’, Editions Gallimard, Paris 1953, page 169 to 172 and from ‘L’inspiration Occitane‘, published by Editions de l’ Eclat in 2014 and then in 2017 for the present edition, from page 54 to 58. A Via-HYGEIA English translation from the original French.

Everything in life is about context; without a proper understanding of context, we get only a cropped vision of reality presenting itself as a whole and we find ourselves more confusedly reacting to external events than being consciously pro-active and doing something about whatever situation life present us with’. Here, below, Simone Weil traces the ’causes & effects’ of the sickness of the ‘European white man’ and the European countries that have opportunistically inherited the legacy of the Roman EMP-ire.

Now, what would this legacy be? Some courageous clues are given below. What we thought we knew about empire(s) is not what lurks under the crimson surface of our reality, beyond the long standing spell cast over us all, maintaining us in a destructive and inhuman illusion, the very nightmare we have been imposed ever since the official fall of the Roman Empire. Happy reading, dear friends, may you be safe and blessed with resilience!

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‘La récompense de la philosophie, c’est la philosophie elle-même,

qui  met notre humanité au centre de tout

et nous apprend à bien user du langage.’

Simone Weil

‘The reward of philosophy is philosophy itself,

which places our humanity at the center of everything

and teaches us to use language well.’

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From ‘La Source Grecque’, excerpt from the study

‘Notes upon the writing of Philolaos.’

‘Again, another correspondence taken from the ‘Timaeus‘ (I-50b & 50a) in which Plato speaks of space as a figure of something that corresponds to what the Virgin Mary is within the Catholic doctrine (perennial matrix, always intact, Mother birthing through a divine Model, a reality that participates into the spiritual experience in ways that are unfathomable, etc…). If we look deeper, the ‘Epitomis‘ (A Via-Hygeia note: Plato’s last work, the final dialogue in the Platonic corpus, a follow-on conversation among the interlocutors of ‘The Laws‘) is eloquent about the predestination of plane figures, hence of space, for the operation of Mediation. (A Via-Hygeia note: See also the preceding Part V).

This is the discovery that made the Greeks drunk: The reality of the sensible universe is made by a necessity, and its laws are the symbolic expression of the mysteries of faith.

It was probably already known, like forever, but locked within secret doctrines and the Greeks may have just re-discovered it. And this was certainly known from the first generation of Christians. For example, we may have here an allusion made by Saint Paul in this marvelous excerpt, by sadly unintelligible in our modern context:

‘May you be rooted and fixed in Love enough, so to have the strength to fathom-and all the saints together-what may be width, length, height and depth, and to know intimately what transmits Christ’s Knowledge & Love.’ (III-Ephesian, 17 & 19)

The quantity of texts, marvelously beautiful and nowadays completely unintelligible contained in the New Testament demonstrate that an infinitely precious part of the Christian doctrine has vanished. Most probably it was systematically destroyed by the Roman Empire, in its domestication of Christianity.

To neutralize a faith, there is one admirable process that consist in initiating the extermination of all those who are propagating it, and then, to make it the official doctrine of a state worshiping idols. After that, the so-called heretics are being exterminated and nothing is more easy to assimilate with them all those who are trying to keep their authentic faith intact. And then, the Church has canonized people like Saint Augustine!

We can see nowadays how successful they were, because after twenty centuries the spirit of Pagan Rome still permeates the universe-us included. If really the doors of Hell haven’t prevailed, it can only mean that real faith is still alive, in secret, in the heart of some hidden people.

It is extraordinary that we give the official adoption of Christianity by the Empire, as a proof that the blood of the martyrs had won over the persecutors, when, actually, it is the reverse! It is the proof that the persecutions succeeded, at an un-thinkable level. Because, under Augustus, the mysteries of Eleusis, even though reduced to a miserable caricature, it did not let itself be stolen and masqueraded as the Roman official religion.

And also, either the Roman Empire was faking its adoption of the Christian religion, or the Apocalypse was lying…Because, even though Rome is not, despite people saying the opposite, represented by the Beast, it does seem obvious that it is represented by the woman full of the names of blasphemy, drunk of the blood of the saints, mother of fornications & abominations on Earth, sitting on the seven hills. It would be a lie, if the Empire would be eligible to Baptism.

Constantine’s decision making Christianity official and the crusade against the Albigeois, followed by the Inquisition, were the two central disasters in the history of Christianity. Saint Augustine followed the first and Saint Thomas of Aquino the second…

‘Regarding to Nature & Harmony, here is what it is all about: What constitute the eternal essence of things and nature itself, it is the object of a divine knowledge and not of a human one; except this: It would not be possible that all the things that exist would be know from us, if there wasn’t as a principle the essence of things of which the order of the world is composed, partaking at the same time of a reality that determines & a reality that is indistinct. Then, connected to this principle, are some dissimilar principles-all from different species; it would be impossible that there would be at their level an order of the world, if the harmony didn’t join, in any produced manner. The similar things, being of the same species, do not need harmony. The things which are neither similar nor from the same species, nor of the same rank, it is then necessary that they are held locked by a harmony susceptible to frame them into an order of the world.’

Obscure, but marvelous text! Here we can link this with a saying from Christ: ‘I am the door‘ (John, X-7 & 9) and one saying from Saint Paul: ‘Through Him all things are reconciled in Him; and established in peace, by mean of the blood of his cross, what is on Earth & in Heaven as well.’ (Colossian, I-20); and Christ’s staunch rebuke to the Pharisee: ‘Woe to you, as you have taken the key of knowledge away!‘ (Luc, XI-52).’

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From ‘L’inspiration Occitane’

‘Each country at the time of the pre-roman antiquity had its vocation, its revelation directed not exclusively, but mainly towards an aspect of the supernatural truth. For Israel, it was God’s Unity, obsessive to the point of becoming ‘a fixed idea’. We cannot know anymore what this would have been for the Mesopotamian civilization. For Persia, it was the opposition between Good & Evil. For India, it was identification, through mystical union, with God & the soul-having reached its perfection. For China, it was God’s intrinsic actions, the divine non-action (wu-wei) which is the blessing of presence. For Egypt, if was charity for one’s kind, expressed with a purity that has never been matched. It was also the immortal bliss of the saved souls after a just life-and this salvation was operated through the assimilation to a God that had lived, suffered, and died of a violent death, and then who became in the other world the judge and savior of the souls. Greece inherited Egypt’s message. Greece also had its proper revelation: it was the revelation of human misery, of God’s transcendence, of the infinite distance between God and Man.

Haunted by this distance, Greece relentlessly worked to build bridges. Every aspect of its civilization is made of these bridges. It religion of the Mysteries, its philosophy, its marvelous art, its science-which is its own invention-and all the subsequent branches of this science, all these, they were bridges between God and Man. The first one, the religion of the Mysteries not included, we have inherited of all the other bridges. I guess, we did quite a work on their architecture! And we now believe they are made for us to live in them! We ignore the simple fact that they exist for us to cross over them; and ironically, we still ignore who or what we would have found on the other side, once we have crossed them!

The best among the Greeks were those who were possessed with the very idea of mediation, between God & Man; a mediation in the descending movement through which God seeks Man. It is this very idea that was expressed in their notion of harmony, of proportion, which is at the center of their thoughts, of their art, of all of their sciences, of their conception of life. When Rome started rattling their gladius, Greece had only started to achieve its vocation of bridge building!

Rome has destroyed all remnants of spiritual life in Greece, and in all the other countries it has submitted and reduced to the degrading condition of provinces. All but one. Contrary to the revelations of other countries, Israel’s revelation had been essentially a collective one, and because of that, coarser-but also harder; only it alone could resist to the pression of Roman terror.

Protected by that shell, the very few remnants of what was left from the Greek spirit that survived had incubated alongside the eastern side of the Mediterranean. Therefore, after three bare centuries, among the burning thirst of so many peoples, a spring perfectly pure gushed. The idea of mediation received the plenitude of reality, the perfect bridge appeared, divine Wisdom-just like what Plato envisioned-became visible to the eyes. The Greek vocation has finally found its perfection, in becoming the Christian vocation.

This filiation, and  consequently also the authentic mission of Christianity, was for a long time prevented to appear. First by just being in the midst of Israel, followed by the belief in the imminent end of the world-a belief essential to the propagation of the message. Even more then by the status of official religion of the Roman Empire. The Beast had been baptized, but in doing so baptism was soiled. The Barbarians in a propitious timing came to destroy it and brought with them fresh & young blood-though with remote traditions attached. At the end of the Tenth century, stability and security were restored again and the influences from Byzantium and the East could circulate freely. This is when the Romanesque civilization flourished. The churches, the sculptures, the Gregorian melodies of that epoch, the very few frescos that are left from the Tenth & Eleventh centuries are the only examples to be quasi-equivalent to ancient Greek art, in its majesty & purity. This was the true Renaissance. The Greek spirit was reborn under the Christian avatar, which is its essential truth.

A few centuries later, another renaissance occurred, the fake one; the one we call today by this name. It had a point of equilibrium where the unity of the two spirits was heralded. But, swiftly, it produced the movement called ‘Humanism’ that consisted in taking all of the bridges the Greeks entrusted us with and made them our permanent dwellings…The minds of the time believed they could turn away they gaze from Christianity to look up to the Greek spirit, when in reality, they stared at the same abode. From then on, the spiritual part present in the life of the European countries declined and reached a point close to oblivion. Today the repeated bites of misfortune made us take in disgust the evolution the present situation is the consequence and the end point. Oh! We have wanted so much to curse and rejected that kind of humanism that the so-called renaissance, the Eighteenth century, and the French Revolution have elaborated! But, in doing so, far from elevating ourselves, we would have abandoned the last and confused image in our possession of the supernatural vocation of Humanity. Our distress is rooted in this fake renaissance. Between the true & the fake one, what happened?’

(To be continued)

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