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The Place of the Sacred in the Absence of God: Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age

The Place of the Sacred in the Absence of God: Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age Peter E. Gordon INTRODUCTION The philosopher Simone Weil, born in France in 1909 to Jewish but secular parents, succumbed to her initial mystical experience in Santa Maria degli Angeli, a twelfth-century Romanesque chapel in Assisi once frequented by Saint Francis. ``Something stronger than I was,'' Weil later wrote, ``compelled me for the first time in my life to go down on my knees.'' An ardently political thinker with Trotskyist sympathies--Lev Bronstein at one point stayed with her family--Weil was known for both an ascetic leftism and a ´ fervidly Catholic piety. The combination inspired peers at the Ecole Normale Superieure to give her a vicious sobriquet: ``the Red Virgin.'' An early pacifist, by 1939 Weil condemned her non-violent period as ``mon erreur criminelle,'' and in exile, first in New York and then London, she became an outspoken essayist for the Free French. Throughout her life she was passionate in spirit but precariously frail in body. By 1943 her acts of stringent self-privation brought her to the Middlesex hospital, where she died of heart failure at the age of only 34. The example of Simone Weil came to mind when reading Charles Taylor's monumental new book, A Secular Age.1 http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of the History of Ideas University of Pennsylvania Press

The Place of the Sacred in the Absence of God: Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age

Gordon, Peter Eli.
Journal of the History of Ideas , Volume 69 (4) – Nov 1, 2008
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Publisher
University of Pennsylvania Press
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Journal of the History of Ideas
ISSN
1086-3222
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Abstract

Peter E. Gordon INTRODUCTION The philosopher Simone Weil, born in France in 1909 to Jewish but secular parents, succumbed to her initial mystical experience in Santa Maria degli Angeli, a twelfth-century Romanesque chapel in Assisi once frequented by Saint Francis. ``Something stronger than I was,'' Weil later wrote, ``compelled me for the first time in my life to go down on my knees.'' An ardently political thinker with Trotskyist sympathies--Lev Bronstein at one point stayed with her family--Weil was known for both an ascetic leftism and a ´ fervidly Catholic piety. The combination inspired peers at the Ecole Normale Superieure to give her a vicious sobriquet: ``the Red Virgin.'' An early pacifist, by 1939 Weil condemned her non-violent period as ``mon erreur criminelle,'' and in exile, first in New York and then London, she became an outspoken essayist for the Free French. Throughout her life she was passionate in spirit but precariously frail in body. By 1943 her acts of stringent self-privation brought her to the Middlesex hospital, where she died of heart failure at the age of only 34. The example of Simone Weil came to mind when reading Charles Taylor's monumental new book, A Secular Age.1

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Journal of the History of Ideas – University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: Nov 1, 2008

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