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apocryphics:

Vladimir Volkoff on Simone Weil. Preface to The Beauty That Saves
Text: “One thing she refers to very often is the mean proportional. You know what the mean proportional is. It is when you have a mathematical relationship like “A divided by B equals B divided by C.” So the mean proportional is this B that relates to A as C relates to B. Simone Weil quotes lots of passages from Scripture that are built exactly along those lines. “Do unto other people as you want other people to do unto you”
“As my Father loved me, I love you.” And so on. We could go on finding many, many passages.
So her (to me) extremely deep intuition is that truth really has a shape, it has a form, and that you can get at the same form, at the same shape, at the same truth, (when I’m talking about form, I’m thinking about Plato of course, the same archetype either from this feeling of love that we find in the Christian religion or this contemplation of the beauty of the universe that we find in Greek philosophy. Of course, let’s not forget that other great Christian thinker Dostoyevski who said: “Beauty will save the world.”
This last paradox has maybe meant more to me than any other. And please forgive me for quoting from myself, which is rather rude and ridiculous, but once again, I’m not a Simone Weil scholar, and the only thing I can talk about is what she has meant to me. Some time ago I was writing an article about Russian icons, and in this article I said something that Will probably startle some of you and then shock some of you, but I don’t mean it as a shocking expression. I said that to me it was not so much that icons were sacred because they represented saints or the Savior or whomever. It is that I believed in Christianity because it was a religion of icons. Because the whole concept that we can represent, that we can have a metaxu, an “in-between,” something that gives the idea of something else, that we can have this mean proportional, that we can have this relationship, to me this is, I wouldn’t call it the proof, but a definite intuition of the truth of Christianity. Some theologian, or rather I don’t remember who, said that a saint was an image of an image, meaning that Jesus Christ is already an image of God and that a saint is a lower image of that image and that somebody who tries to resemble the saint is maybe an image of an image of an image. Or you could say that an icon is an image of an image, the saint being an image. And this hierarchy of images to me means a lot. To me it means my whole concept of the world. You remember the book that we all read when we were children, called Robinson Crusoe? Well, it was in that book that I found something that to me was extremely interesting. It was the situation of a man who had to measure a tree, which was very, very high, or maybe it was a cliff.
I don’t know, something very high. And he couldn’t climb the tree and how would he measure it? And so he devised something very simple, mathematically very simple, a game of triangles. I don’t know enough about geometry in English to give you the right terms. But anyway, you have two triangles which are not equal, but which have the same angles.
If you know the dimensions of the small triangle, you can deduce the dimensions of the larger triangle. This business of triangles, this ability to measure the world, cliffs-and, in fact, that’s I believe how astrono-mers measure distances from the earth to the stars— this ability to judge, to measure the universe, all this we have thanks to such simple things as triangles, triangles born of Greek geometry.
To me this is also part of the same concept of the beauty of the uni-verse, and, to quote myself again, one of my books begins by exactly that same situation taken out of Robinson Crusoe? A man needs to measure a windmill, and to measure the windmill, he uses those triangles. He mesures the ground, and he measures the height of the reed that he plants in the earth. And in measuring this reed, and in measuring the length of the ground, the distance between the reed and the mill, he finally gets the height of the mill. To me, this is really what philosophers, what thinkers can do. They can measure their own little triangles, and from their own little triangles, deduce maybe the great triangles that the universe is made of.
Yousee why I was talking about mediation. The fatherland, for instance, is mediation between man and something much larger. And the Greek philosophies also can be mediation, intellectual mediation between us and the truth. And, finally, we have this concept that there is a ratio to the world. That the world is built—and in fact scientists confirm this— that the world is built according to some formula, that there is a secret to the world. That there is a golden number, if you will, to the world.
Now ratio in Greek, of course, is logos. And logos is what we trans-late, maybe somewhat clumsily, as “the Word.” Of course, theologians explain that logos is also “the Word,” and that Jesus Christ is also the Word. But maybe in a deeper or at least a different sense, we could say: what is the world about? The world is about love, I think. And what is love? Love is a relationship, just like a mathematical relationship. And it has a formula to it. It has a ratio. It has a logos. And this logos of course is the Son. It is Christ. So this is what I found in Simone Weil.