The Madness of Love: Simone Weil's Kenotic Theology of Decreation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines the notion of “decreation” in the thought of the French philosopher and mystic, Simone Weil. Although the term is ambiguous and contested, I argue that the kenotic hymn of Philippians 2 is crucial to understanding the concept and the related vocabulary of renunciation, sacrifice, obedience, slavery, and selflessness in her thought. Weil presents an incisive critique of modernity and the Christian culture within it that calls into question sovereignty and power as divine attributes to be emulated, and that turns instead to the alternative model of relation found in the radical and “mad” love of Christ’s self-emptying servanthood. I begin by examining Weil’s mystical reading of three of Plato’s dialogues (Symposium, Republic, Phaedrus), focusing on her interpretations of several images, speeches, and myths that clarify her understanding of the dynamics of love and force. I then turn to Marguerite Porete’s 14th century dialogue, The Mirror of Simple Souls, to suggest that Porete’s account of the soul’s annihilation in Love illuminates Weil’s concept of decreation. Finally, I consider how Weil imagined decreation might be embodied in her own time through what she calls the “spirituality of work,” which she presents as an alternative to the empire of force in her final text, The Need for Roots. Weil believed that given the right conditions, labour could become an ascetic practice through which the “I” is relinquished in a mutual servanthood that simultaneously “roots” one in the world. Through my analysis, I argue that the mystical, kenotic shape of Weil’s theology offers an account of how radical self-effacement might inform a politics of resistance to contemporary expressions of power, force, and empire.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".