I know others not by knowing myself, but by feeling myself resonating with the experiences of others. It’s the only way we can know: to be open but not empty. I have no other way of knowing an other’s suffering (or joy) except by trying to find comparable experiences in myself. The soul empties itself of all its contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all its truth. For Weil, attention requires self-emptying. “Attention is the highest and purest form of generosity.” Attention is the opposite of a thought that has seized upon some idea too hastily, and thinks it knows (Weil, Reflections, pp 48-49). Attention means not always trying to know, not categorizing, but waiting, as though the other could participate in forming the idea we have of it. The idea is a good one, but Weil gets it mixed up with self-denial, her desire to be nothing more than “a certain intersection of nature and God.” (Love of God, pp 462-463)įor Weil, attention ( attention) means to suspend thinking, leaving one’s mind detached, empty, ready to be entered by the other. Less well known is the way in which Iris Murdoch, Oxford don and novelist, adapted the term. Well known, at least among those who study Weil (perhaps a few thousand), is her concept of attention. Ruth Lindstrom on The Sermon on the Mount is not a sermon.Mary Braithwaite on On Eliot’s Journey of the Magi.John Brennan McLean on Thomas Merton is wrong: Christian mysticism is a bad idea.Albert Camus, the Plague, and Belief in God.William James and the Varieties of Religious Experience.
I read these Christian evangelical novels so you don’t have to.It should have been a good book by a dying man.Karen Armstrong, the new physics, and religion.
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