Hunting the Devils

Simone Weil and Eric Voegelin–Two Paths to the Same Truth–Part 1

by Sylvie Courtine-Denamy 

Sylvie Courtine-Denamy is the author of books on Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil, among them being Three Women in Dark Times: Edith Stein, Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil and her most recent book, Simone Weil. La Quête de racines célestes . She is also a translator of philosophical works into French, including those of Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin. This essay appears here in three parts.

Rejecting Ideology

With Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) and Simone Weil (1909-1943), we are confronted with two philosophers who examine events, understand their present, and consider the "disorder" of their time caused by Marxism, Fascism, and National Socialism.

Their respective works constitute acts of resistance against ideology.

Wondering about the "dark times" (Bertolt Brecht), they diagnose a Europe that suffers from a disease that is not without precedent, a disease that affects the spirit, the soul, and a disease that can be grasped by its several symptoms.

In order to cure this disease, it is necessary to find remedies, and they both believe two countries in particular offer some hope.

A Pattern of Timeless Moments
T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets –Part 2

by Glenn Hughes

Glenn Hughes is Professor of Philosophy at St. Mary’s University, San Antonio.  The present essay, "A Pattern of Timeless Moments," is taken from his latest book, A More Beautiful Question. This excerpt appears with permission and is presented here in four parts.

Time and Timelessness   (concluded)

Eliot is intensely aware, of course, of the degree to which an explicit aware­ness of human life as existence in the in-between of immanence and tran­scendence is absent from modern consciousness.

And when awareness of the metaxy is eclipsed–as much of modern thought shows very well–human life comes to be conceived as an existence whose meaning is completely contained within nature or immanence–within the rhythms, repetitions, and inevita­ble defeats of temporal and material being.

Interpreted and self-embraced as such, this is an existence whose enjoyments tend to mask, if they don't yield to, a despair that reflects that the course of time unredeemed by a relation to timeless meaning is finally a pointlessness of "rising and falling. / Eating and drinking. Dung and death." (East Coker, I, 45-46).

from The Collected Works

Gnosticism
      A Brief Introduction –Part 2

The Anxieties that Lead to Gnosticism

The collapse of the ancient empires of the East,¹ the loss of independence for Israel and the Hellenic and Phoenician city-states, the population shifts, the deportations and enslavements, and the interpenetration of cultures reduce men who exercise no control over the proceedings of history to an extreme state of forlornness in the turmoil of the world, of intellectual disorientation, of material and spiritual insecurity.

The loss of meaning that results from the breakdown of institutions, civilizations, and ethnic cohesion evokes attempts to regain an understanding of the meaning of human existence in the given conditions of the world.

Among these efforts, which vary widely in depth of insight and substantive truth, are to be found: the Stoic reinterpretation of man (to whom the polis had become meaningless) as the polites (citizen) of the cosmos; the Polybian vision of a pragmatic ecumene destined to be created by Rome; the mystery religions; the Heliopolitan slave cults; the Hebrew apocalyptic; Christianity; and Manichaeism. And in this sequence, as one of the most grandiose of the new formulations of the meaning of existence, belongs Gnosticism.

Chesterton (and the rest)

Here Keller, Appropriate This

by Max Arnott

Ian Ker’s new biography of Chesterton, Chesterton: a Biography (a good title that states the case) ought to be a natural for this column, so we admit with embarrassment that we haven’t read it yet. We hope to do a two part review later in the new year; but meanwhile we would like to touch on a problem that has been nagging at us, quietly, but steadily.

This is the question “Okay, I’ve read it, now what?”

One of the things that we seniors do a lot is cast our watery eyes back over expired decades and assess what we remember (if anything).

From your columnist’s rocker, the biggest thing in sight is a pile of books. We started reading in the first grade and haven't stopped, and it is a big, big pile of print.

But in considering this, we have to admit to our dismay, that from all those titles, we remember only about 5 percent.

A Pattern of Timeless Moments
T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets –Part 1

by Glenn Hughes

Glenn Hughes is Professor of Philosophy at St. Mary’s University, San Antonio.  The present essay, "A Pattern of Timeless Moments," is taken from his latest book, A More Beautiful Question. This excerpt appears with permission and is presented here in four parts.

First Impressions

My first encounter with T. S. Eliot's masterpiece, the poem-cycle Four Quar­tets, took place when I was twenty years old.

The conditions were unusually felicitous. I was visiting family friends in southeast England, and during a pe­riod when my host family was away for a few days, I noticed a BBC program announcement in the newspaper. That evening there was to be a broadcast of Alec Guinness reading Eliot's Four Quartets in its entirety.

At the appointed time I turned off all but one lamp, lay down on a couch, and listened.

This first encounter with the Quartets was therefore appropriately audito­ry and incantatory. It was also vision-inducing, strangely moving, and deeply perplexing.