Journal of the History of Ideas

Peter E. Gordon
The Place of the Sacred in the Absence of God: Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age
Journal of the History of Ideas - Volume 69, Number 4, October 2008, pp. 647-673

University of Pennsylvania Press

Project MUSE - Journal of the History of Ideas - The Place of the Sacred in the Absence of God: Charles Taylor's A Secular Age Project MUSE Journals Journal of the History of Ideas Volume 69, Number 4, October 2008 The Place of the Sacred in the Absence of God: Charles Taylor's A Secular Age Journal of the History of Ideas Volume 69, Number 4, October 2008 E-ISSN: 1086-3222 Print ISSN: 0022-5037 DOI: 10.1353/jhi.0.0019 The Place of the Sacred in the Absence of God: Charles Taylor's A Secular Age Peter E. GordonHarvard University Introduction The philosopher Simone Weil, born in France in 1909 to Jewish but secular parents, succumbed to her initial mystical experience in Santa Maria degli Angeli, a twelfth-century Romanesque chapel in Assisi once frequented by Saint Francis. "Something stronger than I was," Weil later wrote, "compelled me for the first time in my life to go down on my knees." An ardently political thinker with Trotskyist sympathies -- Lev Bronstein at one point stayed with her family -- Weil was known for both an ascetic leftism and a fervidly Catholic piety. The combination inspired peers at the École Normale Superieure to give her a vicious sobriquet: "the Red Virgin." An early pacifist, by 1939 Weil condemned her non-violent period as "mon erreur criminelle," and in exile, first in New York and then London, she became an outspoken essayist for the Free French. Throughout her life she was passionate in spirit but precariously frail in...