Intimations of a Spiritual New Age: I. The Spiritual Emergence and Personal Tragedy of a Universalized Christian Mysticism in the Life and Work of Simone Weil
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This is the first in a projected series on the envisionings during the crisis years of the 1930s of a future spiritual New Age consequent on the coming globalization of an individualist, capitalist, technologically driven world economy. In very different ways Jung, the philosophers Bergson and Heidegger, the historian Toynbee, and Wilhelm Reich, foresaw an emergent New Age consistent with a post-modern secular culture. Others such as Teilhard de Chardin, Krishnamurti, and Gurdjieff anticipated their own potential universalizing of more mystical aspects of the world religions. Simone Weil’s version of an essentialized mystical Christianity is part of the latter attempts, including her proposed synthesis with a mystical Platonism, along with her versions of Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism. Eschewing traditional doctrines of Resurrection, after-life, and final judgement, Weil offered her own transpersonal understanding of a “negative theology” of the unknowability of God other than through states of Grace, based on the individual experience of “affliction” uniquely exemplified by Christ on the Cross, and the beauty of the natural order. Her personal struggles throughout her highly original mystical realization, still seen by many as an exemplary guidance toward a Christianity of the future, and its tragic “meta-pathological” inversion in the last years of her short life, attest to challenges entailed in non-traditional transpersonal developments that might anticipate a spirituality of the future.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".