J. Edgar Bauer on Simone Weil

“In her relatively short life, Simone Weil … created a body of work whose intellectual scope and acuity are remindful of religious thinkers such as Blaise Pascal or Søren Kierkegaard. Since no book by Simone Weil appeared in her lifetime and only a few of her writings were intended for publication, a noteworthy reception of her ideas took place only when selections of her notes, diaries and fragments began to be published posthumously after World War II.”

“Simone Weil's intellectual and existential search encompassed several of the major religious and sapiential traditions. Since her religiosity was imbued by Greek thought, Gnosticism, Chinese wisdom, Christian mysticism, and Indian philosophy, it is not surprising that scholars have been especially attentive to her perceptive elaborations on the universal truths informing these — at first sight — hardly compatible spiritual world views.”

“Given that only the religion of pervasive kenosis can be truly universal, no single historical individual can exhaust its fullness by virtue of his redemptive acts, and no religious institution can grasp and articulate its meaning by means of dogmatic or doctrinal teachings. In the last resort, it is in the name of religious universalism that Simone Weil calls for a reversion of historical Christianity to its origins as a religion of kenosis.”