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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
