How can we understand holiness in the 21st century, in an age which is no longer like the 12th century, an age of faith, an age of common culture, of common beliefs, common experience of the sacred and the human? So, in a very different world, what does this holiness mean? Simone Weil was one of the great prophets of our modern times, contemporary of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, another great prophet. Both of them I think reshaped the thinking of theology and of Christian identity in the last days of the last war. For Dietrich Bonhoeffer the question was: ‘The world has come of age. How does Christian faith flourish in a secular society?’ He coined the phrase but didn’t have time to explain what he meant, the idea of ‘religionless Christianity’. And Simone Weil also spoke about a new holiness. A quite new kind of sanctity appropriate to our own time.
A new holiness
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