Simone Weil on pagan mythology

Here’s Simone Weil writing — in Waiting for God — on how, by resisting Christ in her pursuit of the truth, she came to realize that he is the truth waiting for her within everything — even pagan mythology:

For it seemed to me certain, and I still think so today, that one can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truth. Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.

…After this I came to feel that Plato was a mystic, that all the ‘Iliad’ is bathed in Christian light, and that Dionysus and Osiris are in a certain sense Christ himself; and my love was thereby redoubled.

I love this.

This is so much more rewarding a perspective than deciding that we need to counter “worldly art” with “Christian art.”

First of all, even art by the most Christlike of human beings will be clouded with error. We are human makers, and our vision will weave truth and error together no matter who we are — so “Christian art” (if there can be such a thing) will be immediately at problematic as anything else.

Secondly, if anything is truly *art*, then it has some semblance of excellence, imagination, beauty, and truth in it. Instead of taking a contentious stance toward the imaginative expressions of other “worldviews,” Christian freedom allows us to open ourselves to receiving reflections of Christ in the good, the true, and the beautiful within everything.

If we are to call any art “Christian,” let it refer to the beauty of the work, not to the intention of the artist — for so much narrow-minded work tainted with self-righteousness falls under the label “Christian,” and so much that is revelatory of the glory of God comes to us labeled “secular.”