Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace.
Simone Weil (1909€“1943)
Simone Weil who grew up in a secular Jewish family, had experience with Marxism, the labor movement, pacifism, and humanism, and in her mid-thirties choose to become radical Catholic. We might imagine that for Weil her use of the term 'grace' flowed from simple theism and Catholic dogmatism, but on closer reading of of her writing, I have found an advocate for a God that is incarnate in the creation and that holds all creatures in unconditional high regard, a God both natural and divine that supports our human enterprise by enabling us in the pursuit of truth, beauty, liberty and equality.
In the seventeenth century Europeans, and those who followed their intellectual lead began to make a distinction between the perceiving subject, and the world in which we live and move and have our being. The world became an object, rather than the creation of divine beneficence. If the universe was a material machine, if God was an anachronism, what was the source and inspiration of human aspirations? For Simone Weil, the choice seemed to be between a secularized humanism, or taking the radical step for Jew and communist, and becoming a Catholic convert, albeit a theologically independent one.
If we see our world as an object, as a thing to be manipulated, then humans themselves must be the authors of our values of truth, beauty, liberty, and equality. And if we make up of our values, then it follows that our values themselves become objects of our minds, inventions of our social situation, fantasies of our desire. How do we work for an object of our imagination, for an idea? We work to achieve that object. We engage in service, in protests, in institution building, in education, and other means toward our end. All of these are good and worthy pursuits. But in and by themselves all that effort results in what the Christians call "works righteousness." We take credit for success, even when our contribution to the success was only partial. We become frustrated with failure, even when the failure was due to circumstances beyond our control. We divide up into political camps, and make enemies out of our opponents.
I rebel against the choice, for me the cosmos is not foreign to our human being, not an object simply to be understood and conquered by our technology, but is our source and our sustainer. Native American theological thinkers such as George Tinker have helped me to understand the spiritual dimension to what Unitarian Universalists attest to in the seventh principle when we say "respect for the independent web of all existence of which we are a part." But to be in relation with the nature, with the cosmos takes a commitment, a leap of faith, I needed to go beyond affirming a principle to living a relationship. Understanding that, and living my life with that orientation has made a difference in perception. I have come to know existentially that we live in sacred being, in an enchanted universe, in a natural process that transcends our materialism and is not indifferent to human aspirations. Simone Weil struggled with the same impoverished intellectual tradition as Jean Paul Sartre, and she made a different choice.
The concept of "living Cosmos", although present in the modern Catholic tradition with Teilhard de Chardin, has not become an issue in modern theological thinking until the New Age and its sequels, that has forced progressive Catholic theologians to rethink many concepts (see, e.g. Leonardo Boff). Simone Weil was not thinking in a theological context with a New Age reference, but with the references of Marxism and Existentialism, which were the contending philosophies at that historical moment.
Actually Existentialism comes after WWII but was already implicit in the vitalism of Nietzsche and Ortega. But the label is incorrectly used in this context, sorry.
Simone Weil struggled with the same impoverished carthesian and modernist intellectual tradition and made a different choice. Her thinking was not derivative.
Some comments about Weil: "The most spiritual writer of this [twentieth] century." (André Gide). "The only great spirit of our time." (Albert Camus)