Shakespeare and Simone Weil: Online Introduction 26 January 2026
Shakespeare and Simone Weil: Online Introduction 26 January 2026
School of Sophia
Awaken the Love of Wisdom
2026 Spring Season: Power and Grace
School of Sophia launches with a season dedicated to exploring the contrast between power and grace. What is power? Does it always corrupt, as some claim? Can it flourish for the good, or is it something to surrender for wisdom to operate? Could power be transformed by a deeper intelligence?
Our current situations are paradoxes. We are caught between stories of ever-greater power and increasing powerlessness. Advocates for digital technology and AI offer triumphalist narratives promising a power of potentially infinite reaches. But other areas of life, like the climate crisis, seem to be past the point of no return and out of all control.
At the socio-political level, many exhibit grievance towards all forms of power. But others long for the decisive action of authoritarian leaders who want to take away their own power as citizens.
What are these situations calling for? What sort of intelligence is required to meet them? What is the role of wisdom in these difficult times, and where are we to find it?
Our two guiding resources through the year will be Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace. These works will lead our exploration into the ultimate meaning of human power and its relationship with wisdom and grace.
What is School of Sophia?
What is wisdom? Is it in the trees and the water? Is it in the mind or in the heart? Is it to know or not to know? Does it have a place in society - or must we turn against society to be wise? Did ancient and indigenous peoples have wisdom (or do they have it still) and if so, how can others learn from it today?
To answer these questions, the School of Sophia delves into a wide range of wonderful materials from our literary and spiritual heritages: from mysterious ancient myths to spellbinding modern novels, from sacred texts to astonishing works of drama, from philosophy, religion and spirituality through to literature and poetry.
Inspired by the ancient Wisdom Schools, the School of Sophia gathers for weekly seminars to contemplate, reflect, study and dialogue. The love of wisdom, we believe, is our common human heritage, and our courses are open to all of those who are moved to pursue these vital questions.
No skills or previous experience are necessary – other than commitment and enthusiasm! - and all students from all walks are life are warmly welcome.
How the Seminars Work
To learn wisdom is to be a participant at a feast. Wisdom is the food of the whole of our being and the nourishment of the whole of our minds, a delicious kind of knowledge made not to be acquired but savoured and shared. Our seminars are grounded in the premise that wisdom is a real presence that underwrites and makes intelligible all human expression and relationships. It is not the ‘result’ of an act of study but becomes present in and through the act itself and is shared by the community which practices it. Wisdom is not the exclusive possession of the expert, the specialist or the ideologue: it is the common tongue, the common food and the common ground of all.
Weekly seminars, called Lectio Seminars, will take place both on-line and regularly in person. There will also be regular additional sessions, the Contemplatio Seminars, to which guest speakers will be invited, and which will develop particular aspects and themes of our reading.
Lectio Seminars
The Lectio Seminar begins with an introductory lecture and proceeds to a meditative deep reading and creative dialogue. This contemplative form of reading is respectfully inspired by the monastic practice of lectio divina. Since wisdom is ‘delicious’, our approach will be that of the lectio: that is, tasting, savouring and ‘digesting’ the sources in dialogical contemplation rather than reducing them to propositional material fit for a disinterested enquiry. Our approach will therefore be participatory, interpretive and convivial.
Contemplatio Seminars
These seminars will include special guests - thinkers, teachers and artists - and are an opportunity to discuss our weekly readings in the light of greater current issues, to approach our complementary text in various creative ways, and to engage in communal and convivial dialogue grounded in openness and friendship to wisdom.
Choose your plan
Solidarity Fee
£490
Includes: - 10 Lectio seminars; - up to 5 Contemplatio seminars; - access to a discussion group, - access to termly in-person Week-Ends events (locations to include London, Cornwall, and Ireland).
Discounted Fee
£275
This is only available to full-time students, full-time artists and craftspeople, or those whose professions responsibly engage with the natural world. Includes the same as a solidarity fee.
Valentin Gerlier, scholar, songwriter, and musician, led the MA Poetics of Imagination programme at Schumacher College and Dartington Arts School. He is also a Fellow and Tutor at the Temenos Academy, Research Associate in Philosophy at the UC-CERES/Institut Catholique Toulouse and a Visiting Lecturer at several institutions including The University of Notre Dame (London Gateway) and the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Shakespeare and the Grace of Words (Routledge, 2022) and is his forthcoming book is entitled Heaven’s Wildflowers: A Blakean Theory of Nature, Culture and Imagination (Routledge, 2027).
Who we are
Daniël Eikeboom completed his MA Poetics of Imagination with a thesis on the Book of Job and F.W.J. Schelling. He works as a poet and playwright, including his latest translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Last year he founded Walking School Peripatetica, focusing his teachings on mythology and metaphysics in the Italian Alps. Daniël is currently a PhD Candidate at the IOCS, Cambridge.
