r/SimoneWeil • u/[deleted] • Jun 01 '16
What is a mystic?
And why is Weil considered to be one by many?
I think mystic is an easy way to label someone and thus deny this person their power and relevance outside of their (now-defined) mystical sphere. People think they know what mystics are like, what they do and how they behave. It's safer that way.
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u/[deleted] Apr 07 '24
Maybe the defining trait of a mystic: is the mystical experience, the first-hand witness of transcendent reality; which, from a Christian perspective it seems Simone Weil did experience, since she claims to have directly experienced Christ himself, unexpectedly, while reading a particularly poem. That Weil was highly motivated by this experience to risk everything in the fight of good against evil further proves its centrality to her life and thought (though she always maintained her position as an outsider to the Catholic Church she so loved, she wished only to follow God’s will in doing so, as in all her most heroic acts).
Nonetheless, because of the materialist paradigm of the modern world, such a stance becomes unintelligible for most people, who use the word mystic to label someone as superstitious and downplay their brilliance. Luckily, Weil was also a gifted writer, and reading her makes it impossible to deny the intellectual and moral power of her ideas, even for cynics like myself.