Seite 258 [258]
KATE LARSON
THE MYSTERY OF INCARNATION
At one point in her assessment of Plato, Weil writes: "Ihe perfect imitator
of God first of all disincarnates himself, then incarnates himself”! Thus,
Plato and Weil, alike and ultimately, offer a description of an initiation into
the mystery of incarnation. Furthermore, at least on the surface, beauty is
an easier path to this than death and detachment. Essentially, these paths
coincide, but initially beauty is offered graciously and radiantly all around
us. The distinction that Plato draws between appearance and reality is often
stressed as shadows/illusions compared with light and truth. Still, Plato is
certainly not disregarding appearances/phenomena, our everyday living. He
is urging us to pay attention to them, to see them in truthful vision, in their
beauty. Weil writes in her notebooks, “This world is the closed door. It is
a barrier, and at the same time it is the passage-way.”'°
Both Plato and Weil seem to stress the necessity of connecting initiation/
transcendence to recognition, attention to the here and now. I have
always read Plato as advising a form of life rather than a vision of forms.
One might consider the final paragraph of Diotima’s speech to Socrates in
the Symposium; she says, arriving in her description of the ladder of love to
the vision of beauty:
In that life alone, when he looks at beauty in the only way that Beauty can be seen—
only then will it become possible for him to give birth not to images of virtue
(because he’s in touch with no images), but to true virtue (because he is in touch
with the true Beauty).””
This final, intellectual, perhaps mystical vision of Beauty becomes the touch
of beauty on the beholder’s life. Beauty can no longer, as earlier, be praised
in words, poems, treatises, or laws. It is beyond articulation other than in
lived action or context. The ladder of love, thus, moves from momentous
delights/pleasures and actions through intellectual understanding to vision
and a lived, new perspective on life.
The fullness of vision, seeing the world aright, changes the soul of
the beholder and ultimately calls for a way of living.
5 Weil, God in Plato, Late Philosophical Thinking, 69.
16 Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil. Trans. Arthur Willis. 2 vols. London, Routledge, 2004,
492.
7" Plato, Symposium 212a, Complete Works, 494.
Daréczi-Sepsi-Vassänyi_Initiation_155x240.indb 256 6 2020.06.15. 11:04:23