Those who in the moment of extreme affliction touch the true God, have sought him neither as Jews nor as Christians, but as naked souls, stripped of protective beliefs. The Christian conception of sacred history is as distasteful to Simone Weil as the idea of a holy people in Judaism. In her Letter to a Priest, she rejects the Christian “superstition of chronology” which conceives human salvation historically from the date of the appearance of Jesus on earth. The possibility of redemption cannot be dependent on time, it must be present from the beginning; otherwise “it would not be possible to pardon God … for the affliction of so many people uprooted, enslaved, tortured and put to death in the course of centuries preceding the Christian era”. Further, she remarks like Nietzsche that the human face simply does not look more redeemed since the advent of Christ. Redemption touches the most inward part of the soul; the moment of redemption belongs solely to the individual soul, and it is a moment outside of the stream of history which in fact wrenches the individual soul from its social milieu and historical context. The redeemer is coeval with the soul’s thirst for redemption. The Incarnation, the Passion and the Redemption cannot be thought at one time future and at another time past, they are always present.
— Susan Taubes, ‘The Riddle of Simone Weil’ (via here)
Notes from a Room 