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Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil (Gravityの節のみ)

2022-06-15 12:28:25 | その他
GRAVITY AND GRACE, Simone Weil

All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception.

We must always expect things to happen in conformity with the laws of gravity unless there is supernatural intervention.

Two forces rule the universe: light and gravity.

Gravity. Generally what we expect of others depends on the effect of gravity upon ourselves, what we receive from them depends on the effect of gravity upon them. Sometimes (by chance) the two coincide, often they do not.

What is the reason that as soon as one human being shows he needs another (no matter whether his need be slight or great) the latter draws back from him? Gravity.

Lear, a tragedy of gravity. Everything we call base is a phenomenon due to gravity. Moreover the word baseness is an indication of this fact.

The object of an action and the level of the energy by which it is carried out are distinct from each other. A certain thing must be done. But where is the energy to be drawn for its accomplishment? A virtuous action can lower a man if there is not enough energy available on the same level.

What is base and what is superficial are on the same level. ‘His love is violent but base’: a possible sentence. ‘His love is deep but base’: an impossible one.

If it be true that the same suffering is much harder to bear for a high motive than for a base one (the people who stood, motionless, from one to eight o’clock in the morning for the sake of having an egg, would have found it very difficult to do so in order to save a human life), a base form of virtue is perhaps in some respects better able to stand the test of difficulties, temptations and misfortunes than a noble one. Napoleon’s soldiers. Hence the use of cruelty in order to sustain or raise the morale of soldiers. Something not to be forgotten in connexion with moral weakness.

This is a particular example of the law which generally puts force on the side of baseness. Gravity is, as it were, a symbol of it.

Queueing for food. The same action is easier if the motive is base than if it is noble. Base motives have in them more energy than noble ones. Problem: in what way can the energy belonging to the base motives be transferred to the noble ones?

I must not forget that at certain times when my headaches were raging I had an intense longing to make another human being suffer by hitting him in exactly the same part of his forehead.

Analogous desires—very frequent in human beings.

When in this state, I have several times succumbed to the temptation at least to say words which cause pain. Obedience to the force of gravity. The greatest sin. Thus we corrupt the function of language, which is to express the relationship between things.

Attitude of supplication: I must necessarily turn to something other than myself since it is a question of being delivered from self.

Any attempt to gain this deliverance by means of my own energy would be like the efforts of a cow which pulls at its hobble and so falls onto its knees.

In making it one liberates a certain amount of energy in oneself by a violence which serves to degrade more energy. Compensation as in thermodynamics; a vicious circle from which one can be delivered only from on high.

The source of man’s moral energy is outside him, like that of his physical energy (food, air etc.). He generally finds it, and that is why he has the illusion—as on the physical plane—that his being carries the principle of its preservation within itself. Privation alone makes him feel his need. And, in the event of privation, he cannot help turning to anything whatever which is edible.

There is only one remedy for that: a chlorophyll conferring the faculty of feeding on light.

Not to judge. All faults are the same. There is only one fault: incapacity to feed upon light, for where capacity to do this has been lost all faults are possible.

‘My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me.’

There is no good apart from this capacity.

To come down by a movement in which gravity plays no part. … Gravity makes things come down, wings make them rise: what wings raised to the second power can make things come down without weight?

Creation is composed of the descending movement of gravity, the ascending movement of grace and the descending movement of the second degree of grace.

Grace is the law of the descending movement.

To lower oneself is to rise in the domain of moral gravity.

Moral gravity makes us fall towards the heights.

Too great affliction places a human being beneath pity: it arouses disgust, horror and scorn.

Pity goes down to a certain level but not below it. What does charity do in order to descend lower?

Have those who have fallen so low pity on themselves?

ISLAEL, Gravity and Grace , Simone Weil 2

2022-06-15 07:58:58 | その他
ISRAEL

Christendom has become totalitarian, conquering, and exterminating, because it has not developed the idea of God’s absence and non-activity here below. It has attached itself to Jehovah no less than to Christ, and conceived of Providence in the manner of the Old Testament. Only Israel could stand up to Rome, because it resembled it; and this is how the birth of Christianity was marked with the Roman stain before it became the official religion of the Empire. The evil done by Rome has never been truly redressed.

God’s promises to Moses and Joshua were purely temporal, made at a time when Egypt was moving towards the eternal salvation of the soul. Having refused the Egyptian revelation, the Hebrews got the God they deserved: a carnal and collective God who, right up to the exile, did not speak (except in the Psalms?) to a single soul…. The only pure individuals in the poems of the Old Testament are Abel, Enoch, Noah, Melchisedek, Job, and Daniel. It is not surprising that little could be expected of such a people, fugitive slaves, conquerors of a paradise which had been fashioned by civilizations in whose labour they had not shared and which they destroyed through massacres. To speak of an ‘educational God’ in connection with this people is a cruel joke.

It is not astonishing that there should be so much evil in a civilization—ours—contaminated to the core, in its very inspiration, by this terrible lie. The curse of Israel rests on Christendom. Israel meant atrocities, the Inquisition, the extermination of heretics and infidels. Israel meant (and to a certain extent still does …) capitalism. Israel means totalitarianism, especially with regard to its worst enemies.

There can be no personal contact between man and God except through the person of the Mediator. Without the latter, God can only be present to man collectively, nationally. Israel chose the national God and simultaneously rejected the Mediator; it may, at one time or another, have moved towards true monotheism, but it always fell back on, and was unable not to fall back on, the God of the tribe.

Anyone who has contact with the supernatural is essentially sovereign, for in the form of the infinitely small he is a presence in society which transcends the social order.

But the place he occupies in the social hierarchy is completely immaterial. As for what is great in the social order, only he is capable of it who who has harnessed a large part of the Great Beast’s energy. But he can have no share in the supernatural.

Moses, Joshuah—that is the share in the supernatural of those who have harnessed much social energy. Israel was an attempt at supernatural social life. No country, presumably, has suceeded better at this kind of thing. Useless to start again. The result shows just what sort of divine revelation the Great Beast is capable of.

Isaiah the first to bring pure illumination.

Israel stood up to Rome because its God, even though immaterial, was a temporal sovereign on a par with the Emperor, and thanks to this Christianity could be born. The religion of Israel was not noble enough to be fragile, and due to its solidity could protect belief in the most elevated.[23]

For the Passion to be possible, it was necessary that Israel ignore the idea of the Incarnation. Rome, too (these were, perhaps, the only two peoples to ignore it). But it was necessary that Israel have some share in God. As great a share as possible without being spiritual or supernatural. Exclusively collective religion. It was because of this ignorance, this darkness, that it became the chosen people. So one can understand Isaiah, ‘I have hardenend their hearts, so that they may not hear my words.’

That is why, in Israel, everything is sullied by sin, as there is no purity without participating in the divine incarnation, so that a lack of such participation should be obvious.

Jacob’s struggle with the angel – is not this the great blemish? ‘The Eternal … will do justice to Jacob according to his works. In his mother’s womb did he already displace his brother, and, in his manliness, triumph over a God. He fought against an angel and was vanquished, and here he cries and asks for mercy …’ Isn’t this the great tragedy, to battle against God and not to be vanquished?

Israel. From Abraham onwards (including himself, but excepting some of the prophets), and as though it had been planned, everything becomes sullied and foul, as if to demonstrate quite clearly: Look! There it is, evil!

A people chosen for its blindness, chosen to be Christ’s executioner.

The Jews, that handful of uprooted people, have caused the uprootedness of the whole terrestrial globe. Their involvement in Christianity has made of Christendom, in regard to its own past, something uprooted. The orientation of the Enlightenment, 1789, secularism, etc. have infinitely increased this uprooting, through the lie of progress. And uprooted Europe has uprooted the rest of the world, by colonial conquest. Capitalism, totalitarianism, have a share in this progressive uprootedness; the antisemites, naturally, propagate the Jewish influence. But before Assyria in the Orient and Rome in the Occident uprooted through poison, they had alreardy uprooted with the broadsword.

It was primitive Christianity that fabricated the poisonous idea of progress, through the notion of a divine education that was to mould man and enable him to receive the message of Christ. This accorded with the expectation as imminent phenomena of a universal conversion of nations and the end of the world. But as neither of these had come about, the notion of progress was, after seventeen centuries, extended beyond the moment of the Christian Revelation. At this point, it had to turn itself against Christianity.

The other poisons mixed with the truth in Christianity are Jewish in origin. The former is specifically Christian.

The metaphor of a divine education dissolves the individual destiny, which alone matters for salvation, into the destiny of a people.

Christianity wanted to look for a harmony in history. This is the germ of Hegel and Marx. The notion of history as a directed continuity is a Christian notion.

It seems to me that few ideas could be more utterly mistaken.

Looking for harmony in the future, in what is contrary to eternity. Bad union of contraries.

Humanism and what has arisen out of it, is not a return to antiquity, but a development of poisons that are internal to Christianity.

It is supernatural love that is free. In trying to force it, one substitutes for it a natural love. Conversely, however, freedom without supernatural love—that of 1789—is entirely empty, a simple abstraction, with no possibility of ever becoming real.

[23] Note, as Simone Weil does here, that on the one hand the history of Israel contains flashes of pure mysticism (Isaiah, etc.); and that, on the other hand, incipient Christanity was protected by its Jewish ‘shell’. This is already to legitimate Israel’s divine mission.

機内食自販機@羽田ターミナル2 1F

2022-06-15 00:37:41 | その他

【爆売れ】羽田空港に「機内食の自動販売機」が誕生 → まさかの売切れ → 意外なところで買えた!

【爆売れ】羽田空港に「機内食の自動販売機」が誕生 → まさかの売切れ → 意外なところで買えた!

2022年6月、東京の空の玄関口・羽田空港にユニークな自動販売機が誕生した。なんと「機内食の自動販売機」である。ジビエ・ドレッシング・ビャンビャン麺……などなど、最 …

ロケットニュース24


2Fの売店でも売ってるそうです。