"He who, seeking God, does not find him in the world, he who suffers the utter silence and nothingness of God, still lives in a religious universe: a universe whose essential meaning is God, though that meaning be torn in contradiction and the most agonizing paradoxes. He lives in a universe that is absurd, but whose absurdity is significant, and its significance is God."
"God can be present to us only in the form of his absence."
"Simone Weil's mysticism of atheistic purification bears some resemblance to the 'dark night of the soul' of St. John of the Cross, to whom she frequently refers in her notes. But while the Spanish mystic is describing an ecstatic experience of the soul's death prior to its re-birth in God, for Simone Weil the dark night of God's absence is itself the soul's contact with God. When she speaks of an 'ineffable consolation' that fills the soul after it has renounced everything, renounced even the desire for grace, she does not mean that supernatural love is something distinct from the acceptance of the void. To endure the void, to suffer evil, is our contact with God."
--Susan Taubes, "The Absent God"
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Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis truly is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read. The total, unconditional love he has for his lover Bosie, even though Bosie treated him so awfully and is the reason he’s writing this letter from prison for having a sexual relationship with this man who doesn’t even care about him. The way he connects this unconditional love he feels to Christ, the first romantic, who found true beauty and depth of soul in sorrow and sin and the real understanding of love and human complexity that can only come from such deep low points. His commitment to seeing everything through a lens of love, meaning a belief - a hope - in the potential and value of all people. The way he sees that as his only way to stay sane, because hate and meanness eat you from the inside and make life miserable. The way that this love sadly blinded him in how overwhelming it was, and made him unable to direct it rationally towards Bosie’s moral improvement, instead enabling Bosie in his cruel indifference to his wellbeing. A sadly inauthentic love of delusional devotion rather than clear-sighted platonic compassion. The tragedy of this is exquisite- and the beauty of his perseverance through this tragedy. The way he learns that the truly loving thing is to try and teach Bosie how to learn from his mistakes, to embrace love with him. Realising that combining his love with concern for morality makes it more honest, and loving him even when he acknowledges and critiques his faults is a more truly unconditional love. His commitment to an idea of what people could be by looking at them with love, living with a focus on what isn’t, but might be, is, especially with all the Christ references, almost a negative theology.
It reminded me of Simone Weil’s belief in an absent, mysteriously impotent God, who communicates to us and materialises itself in the world through our consciences. But Wilde’s is a more hopeful image than Weil’s. Weil believed that suffering, even total dehumanising suffering must be accepted as part of the fundamental evil of the universe. We cannot help but fight against it, driven by God’s urge to love, but it is part of God’s plan and so it must be revered, even embraced, as worship. For Wilde love of suffering is useful simply because it allows for better understanding and a more peaceful soul. Both recognise love as a necessary part of understanding, for Weil part of her famous philosophy of learning through attention rather than effort, but for her it is again for the purpose of worship. Both died as a result of their tremendous love. Weil from starving herself out of solidarity with prisoners of war, Wilde from ill health as a result of his time in prison, sent there only because he foolishly trusted his beloved’s advice.
The more I write the more I realise the difference between them in incredibly slim, but I still see more hope in Wilde’s vision. For Wilde love makes life worth living, a way to improve the world through enthusiastically sharing it. It is a means to an end of collective happiness. For Weil it is pure service to an absent, dead concept, a horribly nihilistic distortion of religion. I love Weil so much. Her purity of purpose is inspiring, from her work in factories, to her fighting in the Spanish Civil War, to her work with the French resistance. But her vision of the world was miserable and austere, and explains to me some of the more conservative elements of her otherwise radical political philosophy. Wilde’s love is a love of hope and joy, and I genuinely think that having read his ideas have made me a better person. Wilde was an agnostic, but his writing on Christ almost made me consider religion again, from a purely negative theology perspective. I think Weil demonstrates the folly of that though. I thank her for providing that.
I do think the similarities between these two are cool though. They were both extremely unusual people, outspoken, abrasive individuals. I wonder if there’s anything in the fact that Wilde was bisexual and Weil seems to have had some sort of gender fuckery going on (she would sometimes sign letters as a man, as a sort of maybe, maybe not joke - in Lars Iyer’s book My Weil the character who takes on her name is fittingly a trans woman). Their shared queerness in a time when that was very much not accepted (Wilde went to prison for it, that’s where he wrote the letter) may explain their similar individuality and introspection and critical eye towards conventional morality. Certainly with Wilde that makes sense, Weil idk though - she’s just built different I think.
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i had a friend talk about a convo she had with another white student about how young poc faculty members tend to be harsh or how they had bad experiences with young poc faculty members and this is in the context of her having a truly objectively terrible experience with an asian faculty member (intentional grade sabotage) but it was.. really awkward. like a lot of complicated issues tangled up into one..
i get it because there is the sense that young poc faculty members tend to be.. not harsh but strict? precisely because they can’t afford to be chummy since they know the students will walk over them otherwise. white tenured faculty members have the luxury of being able to be chummy and informal and still command respect, but imagine being a young untenured poc faculty-- think about all the bullshit they’ve had to go through to arrive at to this place and the extra effort they have to put in to command minimal respect. so i’ve seen young poc faculty being more formal and I totally get why they are like that.
but it still felt so weird for a white student to relay to me how another white student told them “i’ve had similar bad experiences with young poc faculty members” like... what warrants that kind of generalization? also do you not feel weird telling me a poc person in academia that? even i (an asian) would never talk that way about other poc faculty or just people in general..
she’s a good friend who bc of her queerness suffered/suffers a lot, and she is well meaning and all, but idk i guess this is where the insurmountable whiteness comes in. lowkey sad and weird
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“Balthasar’s form of negative theology is close to the fierce Lutheran conviction that it is only in that concrete otherness to God embodied in the abandonment of the crucified Messiah to death and hell that the divine difference, both within God and between God and the finite order, can be seen.”
—Rowan Williams, “Balthasar and difference,” in Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology
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There may be an extent to which a lot of the ideas about unity that I talked about a few months back in relationship to Platonism and Neoplatonism that are in themselves simply statements about Christian interpretations of those philosophies. Something feels clearer. Or at least, most particularly, the way Christian negative theology may in fact actually rely very heavily on Neoplatonist apophatic philosophy, but in so doing appropriate it in order to try and identify the Christian God with the first principle of Platonism or Neoplatonism.
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The reason why the Problem of Evil remains, at least on the surface, yet-unresolved for me is because any definition of Love that permits harm is an empty one. I've come to realize there can be no exceptions to this, for those exceptions would contradict the premise.
If God doesn't will our best interest both in the long-term and in the immediate (if harm, suffering, etc. are not intrinsic negatives but, rather, mere means to ends), then [A] there is no moral standard by which to operate (which a Christian, of all religions, requires) and [B] our God cannot be a God of Love (which He categorically is).
I don't mind leaving the space blank, this question unanswered in my lifetime--some things which look to be opposites or incompatible often wind up becoming so with the addition of extra dimensions to our understanding (to which we, in our presently temporally-bound conscious states, can't yet have access.) I know that a source for goodness must exist (and that the God of Abraham best fits the bill) and that, for a worldview to be truly compassionate, suffering must be acknowledged as an evil or intrinsic negative.
What I'm not about to do is go about calling Evils like harm and suffering "morally neutral" or even "good." Progressive Leftists ironically seem to be among the only group with a sort of "pure" remaining definition of compassion. Everyone else has resorted to some model or other of the belief, "(Some) Harm is good for you; no need to mitigate it." This is true in the immediate sense, but if we presume suffering to be an intrinsic negative with only extrinsically-attached positives (e.g., you get into a car crash but that prevents you from later being crushed by a crumbling building), we also need to acknowledge the negative value of "little" harms and harms that are presumed or perceived to "bring about" other goods. (It's important not to internalize the latter, because a harm or harm-doer should never be thanked for any good that may result from it or their actions; the good, itself, is what should be thanked, praised, etc.)
I have accepted some harms must come to pass here on our imperfect Earth, that Heaven and the New Earth are the Ideal, and I can also understand and conceptualize (as can any adult, or even teenager) that sometimes temporary harms are "necessary," though only in the pragmatic sense, and not the ideological. The distinction between pragmatism and ideology is crucial when understanding good and evil, intrinsic negative and positive values.
But a good chunk of modern Christians have fallen into the trap of Nihilism (that is, thinking all things & situations must be good just because God is.) A Nihilistic Christian is a theological paradox, because ours is a God of Truth. Their drive for certainty leads them to premature conclusions, and, ironically, forsaking the very thing that makes our worldview unique.
I prefer, "God doesn't will harm on us but allows & enacts it for the greater good/His plan, all while acknowledging the harm as bad," to the overly-simplistic, "Anything God wills is good" (thus rendering all negatives as positive and all moral value in the universe neutralized, i.e., Nihilism.) It's really a matter of wording, I know, but acknowledging each piece is crucial if we want to remain true to our beliefs. Everything is ultimately of God.
I also acknowledge that my perception that "God shouldn't have allowed evil/suffering/harm to exist in the first place," truly is higher on the metaphorical mountain of enlightenment from my temporally-bound perspective & my current information, that a new dimension of understanding might well ad the answer to the Problem of Evil that provides Necessity to evil/suffering/harm's existence, but thirdly that I must also nevertheless keep-hold to my current, pure, "simplistic" definition of compassion lest I be led to abuser-logic or abandoning the True Path (which, yes, means seeing the existence of evil/suffering/harm as a Mistake for the time that I'm alive.)
Saying something needed* to happen and saying that thing was still not okay are two crucial skills--by abandoning the latter, modern Christians have wholly shifted their spiritual alignment. Everything happens according to God's plan, and God is purely good, and evil is evil, distinct from good. We must be willing and able to acknowledge when something is unjust to be truly compassionate and have a compassionate worldview. A worldview that says, "Everything is just, and right, and already perfect." is cold and devoid of love.
*in the temporary, pragmatic sense
For all these reasons, I don't believe there can be a solution to the Problem of Evil (except, perhaps, through some Missing Ingredient) so long as we maintain a compassionate worldview, for any compassionate worldview would necessarily perceive Evil as a Problem, while the only way to perceive it as Resolved is through uncompassion (the blood of Christ is another subject; here, "resolved" is meant for the future, while the present world remains fallen.)
I think God wants us to keep seeing evil as evil, even if it means getting mad at Him, so that we're not tempted to harm one another in the name of (our) greater-good.
"Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!" 2 Timothy 3:1-4
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