Connor Brown’s Reviews > Gravity and Grace > Status Update

"We must attain to the knowledge of a still fuller reality in suffering, which is a nothingness and a void. In the same way, we have to love life greatly in order to love death still more."

"There is every degree of distance between the creature and God. A distance where the love of God is impossible. Matter, plants, animals. Here, evil is so complete that it destroys itself; there is no longer any evil: mirror of divine innocence. It is a great privilege since the love which unites is in proportion to the distance."

"To allow the imagination to dwell on what is evil implies a certain cowardice; we hope to enjoy, to know, and to grow through what is unreal."

Moving glacially through this, because Weil just drops things like this:

"Evil is to love, what mystery is to the intellegence. As mystery compels the virtue of faith to be supernatural, so does evil the virtue of charity."

"...every contact with good leads to a knowledge of the distance between good and evil and the commencement of a painful effort of assimilation.... The corresponding sin cannot come about unless a lack of hope makes the consciousness of the distance intolerable, and changes pain into hatred. Hope is a remedy in this respect. But a better remedy is indifference to ourselves, being happy because the good is good..."

"...at the contact of a perfectly pure being there is a transmutation, and the sin becomes suffering. Such is the function of the just servant of Isaiah, of the Lamb of God. Such is redemptive suffering. All the criminal violence of the Roman Empire ran up against Christ, and in him it became pure suffering. Evil beings, on the other hand, transform simple suffering (sickness, for example) into sin."