The French philosopher Simone Weil was a soul at odds with herself and with a world of affliction. The causes she espoused as a social activist and the faith she professed as a mystic were urgent to her and, as she saw it, to humanity. Little of her work was published in her lifetime, but since her death, at thirty-four, in 1943, it has inspired an almost cultlike following among readers who share her hunger for grace, and for what she called “decreation”—deliverance from enthrallment to the self.
Eminent theologians have revered Weil (Paul Tillich, Thomas Merton, Pope Paul VI), and so have writers of the first rank, especially women (Hannah Arendt, Ingeborg Bachmann, Anne Carson, Flannery O’Connor, Susan Sontag). Albert Camus hailed her as “the only great spirit of our time.” T. S. Eliot credited her with a “genius akin to that of the saints.” But Weil herself might have objected to these consecrations as a form of “idolatry,” which she defined as a misguided thirst for “absolute good.” Nothing is so absolute about her as the difficulty of parsing her contradictions. Her writing radiates a cosmic empathy that coexists, sometimes on the same page, with a strain of intolerance blind to life’s tragicomedy. She resists any system that enslaves the individual to a collective, but her own vision of an enlightened society—the subject of her most famous work, “The Need for Roots”—is an autocracy modelled on Plato’s Republic. Weil would gladly have died fighting the Nazis. Yet even as her Jewish family fled the Final Solution, she condemned Judaism with what her biographer Francine du Plessix Gray justly calls “hysterical repugnance.”
It’s a conundrum of Weil’s biography that most basic human needs were alien to her. She shrank from the touch of another body, and considered her own “disgusting.” She slept on the floor in an unheated room. For most of her life, she subsisted on a starvation diet—in solidarity, she said, with the world’s victims of war and famine. Extreme fasting has a long history among female saints, though it was chastened by the Church as a sin of pride. Weil’s biographers have debated whether to call her “anorexic”; the psychiatrist Robert Coles prefers to see her as a “famished seeker.” In seeking transcendence from her mortal hungers, her extremity exerts a magnetic force: it has the power both to captivate and to repel us.
Weil formulated her extremity succinctly in “Gravity and Grace,” an anthology of numinous aphorisms that is widely considered her masterpiece: “Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection.” She insisted that her solitude was “ordained,” and that she had to be “a stranger and an exile in relation to every human circle.” But a friend who published “Gravity and Grace,” Gustave Thibon, suggested that she was fooling herself. She “was not detached from her detachment,” he said.
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A new collection of family correspondence, “Simone Weil: A Life in Letters,” edited and annotated by Robert Chenavier and André A. Devaux, gives perspective to Thibon’s koan. Weil’s nicknames for her parents, Bernard and Selma, are Biri and Mime, and she signs one message “Your little girl who loves you with all her strength but pays no attention to spelling misstakes.” She mostly addresses her mother. Many of these missives are dashed-off notes from camp—a daughter assuaging a mother’s anxiety about her welfare, or scolding her for it, or asking for cigarettes and coffee filters, or reporting cheerfully on a tour of Italy (“Very beautiful, La Scala”), or threatening that she “won’t eat for two weeks” if Mime sends her a care package she hasn’t asked for. Yet they humanize Weil the icon by the very fact of their banality, and by their poignant testimony to her umbilical dependence as a child who never really left home.
Weil’s intellect navigated time and space with supreme self-sovereignty, but her body lacked a steering wheel. She had abnormally small and clumsy hands. She suffered from crippling migraines and severe myopia. She bumped into furniture as she crossed a room. She was devoid of common sense. Knowing how rash she was, and how unfit for the hardships that she would court—factory labor and frontline combat, risks that endangered the very people in whose name she took them—the Weils became helicopter parents, ever poised to swoop down and rescue her.
Like many saints and revolutionaries, Weil was a child of privilege. She and her brother André, one of the twentieth century’s preëminent mathematicians, grew up in luxury. Bernard was a successful internist; Selma was an heiress. One is startled to learn from the letters that Simone enjoyed tennis and skiing. Despite her preference for hovels, she wasn’t a stranger to posh hotels. She loved the sea, so the family often summered at the beach. They were together in Portugal when she had her first mystical experience and in Nice when Hitler invaded Poland.
The plump, vivacious Madame Weil was the kind of formidable homemaker whom my own Jewish grandmother would have called “a real balabusta” (followed by the explanation that “you could eat off her floor”). Her germ phobia may have infected Simone with her lifelong revulsion at bodily contact. The breath of strangers was fraught with peril, so Selma’s children had to ride the bus on its open upper deck even in winter and to dodge kisses from anyone but close kin. Weil’s school friend and first biographer, Simone Pétrement, makes a point of praising Selma’s warmth and her tireless efforts to mother everyone in her orbit, with an “ability to organize . . . so overpowering that one was tempted to submit to her.” But perhaps her competence was so daunting that it discouraged Weil from cultivating any. In one of her letters, she asks Mime how to boil rice.
Simone had been such a sickly infant that she wasn’t expected to survive. As a toddler, she refused solid food. At five, she was a holy terror, “with an indescribable stubbornness neither her father nor I can make a dent in,” Selma told a friend. That year, perhaps not by coincidence, André, who was eight, discovered mathematics and disappeared into them. Simone worshipped him. He had taught her to read as a surprise for their father. They recited Racine together. Ancient Greek became their secret language. (They used it to argue about Nietzsche.) When they lost their tempers, as siblings do, they mauled each other silently in a bedroom, since raised voices upset their mother.
Selma had been forbidden to study medicine by an old-fashioned father, and she channelled her frustrated ambitions into educating her wunderkinds, hiring the best private tutors and enrolling her children in the top lycées. By twelve, André was working at a graduate level and reading Homer in the original. At fourteen, he passed his baccalaureate, then sailed through the gruelling entrance exam for France’s most prestigious university, the École Normale Supérieure. Simone was one of only two women in her class at the Normale, and finished first on the exam in general philosophy and logic, with another famous Simone—de Beauvoir, a similarly prodigious grind—right behind her. But André was a certified genius, and she never felt equal to him. At the onset of puberty, and of the migraines and depressions that subsequently plagued her, she “seriously thought of dying,” she wrote, because “the extraordinary gifts of my brother, who had a childhood and a youth comparable to Pascal’s, brought my own inferiority home to me.”
It wasn’t only her brother’s mind that Simone envied. She chafed at her assignment to the second sex, and wanted nothing to do with femininity. Selma was admirably sympathetic. “I do my best,” she told a friend, “to encourage in Simone not the simpering graces of a little girl, but the forthrightness of a boy even if it must seem rude.” Both parents referred to their younger child, at “his” request, as “our son number two,” and she used the masculine form of French participles in her student letters to them, which she signed “Simon.”
Beyond the sanctuary of home, however, Weil was perceived as a freak, especially by male contemporaries, who took her indifference to charming them as an affront to their masculinity. Her manners were brusque to the point of surliness, and her tactlessness was legendary. In an era when public cross-dressing was illegal for women, she sometimes wore what looks like a mechanic’s jumpsuit, though her standard uniform was a grubby military-style greatcoat and a workman’s beret. The principal of the Normale called her the Red Virgin. Georges Bataille caricatured her in his novel “Le Bleu du Ciel”: “A girl of twenty-five, ugly and visibly dirty. . . . The short, brittle, uncombed hair under her hat gave her crow’s wings on either side of her face. She had the big nose of a skinny Jewess with sallow skin between the two wings and under her wire-rimmed glasses.” Yet the poet Jean Tortel, who met Weil years later in Marseilles, would capture a charisma that Bataille had missed:
Weil came of age during the Depression, and her twenties were a decade of militant engagements—first as a Marxist, then as a radical trade unionist who taught Latin and French literature to workers, then as a pacifist so uncompromising that, until Hitler invaded France, she favored appeasing him. But she couldn’t resist the chance to fight Fascism with a gun, so she enlisted in the Spanish Civil War, whose atrocities on both sides so disillusioned her that she would call revolution, not religion, the “opium of the people.” (Her brief misadventure fighting Franco with the anarchist Durruti Column ended when she stumbled into a pot of cooking oil and suffered third-degree burns. Had her parents not been hovering nearby to evacuate her, she might have died of gangrene.)
But the defining chapter of Weil’s life on the barricades was her stint as a blue-collar worker. In 1934, she talked a sympathetic factory owner into hiring her incognito for his assembly line. It was the first of three jobs as a cog in the machine which left her “broken” mentally and physically. (In between them, Biri and Mime took her to recuperate at a Swiss sanitarium.) As a gratuitous ordeal, this episode has an aura of performance art, and Weil knew, of course, that she was only “a professor gone slumming.” But it was also a profound conversion experience. From then on, as Gray notes, there was a shift in her language. The Marxist catchword “oppression” was replaced by “affliction,” a word from the Book of Job. “Affliction is not a psychological state,” Weil wrote. “It is a pulverization of the soul.” It “compels us to recognize as real what we do not think possible.”
Weil’s latest biographer, Robert Zaretsky, reminds us that she, like Orwell, was the rare “voice on the left” to denounce Fascism and Communism “with the same vehemence.” One of the Weils’ Paris apartments was a duplex on the Left Bank whose upper floor Simone once loaned to Trotsky for a clandestine meeting—a pretext for confronting him with Soviet ruthlessness. In the next room, her mother listened with alarm to the shouting. Trotsky was berating Weil for her “reactionary” individualism. (His wife chuckled at the audacity of “this child” who was “holding her own” with the great man.)
The ability to see what others couldn’t was a gift of Weil’s supreme intelligence, and also probably of what Elizabeth Hardwick calls her “spectacular and in many ways exemplary abnormality.” Her piety was as idiosyncratic as her politics, and many creeds attracted her: Buddhism, Stoicism, Spinoza’s notion that God is nature. She was especially drawn to the Cathars, a medieval sect whose ascetic practices spoke to her own quest for disembodiment, as did their martyrdom. (They were annihilated in the fourteenth century.)
Catholicism was ultimately the persuasion most congenial to Weil, but she never formally converted, in part because she believed, heretically, in free access to divine truth. Her excuse for refusing baptism was that she couldn’t join a church that used the promise of paradise “to blackmail and to damn anyone who rejects her infallibility.” In fact, eternal life didn’t tempt her any more than earthly pleasures did. Her ultimate hunger was for “the void”—an inner vacuum of need, desire, and even thought which grace could fill if she waited for it with “extreme attention.” Attention, as she conceives it, isn’t the willed contraction of mental muscles needed to grapple with a problem but the state of being present with a mystery and resisting the urge to solve it.
There was one mystery that Weil never thought worthy of attention: her callousness toward the Jewish people’s persecution. It is more incomprehensible considering her version of the Golden Rule: “The love of our neighbor . . . simply means being able to say to him, ‘What are you going through?’ It is a recognition that the sufferer exists . . . as a man exactly like us.”
Weil’s parents came from observant families on both sides. Bernard was an agnostic who apparently harbored some distaste for his Orthodox upbringing. (He told Gustave Thibon “vaguely antisemitic” jokes.) But his pious mother often came to visit. Selma, whose mother shared their home, had escaped from Russia as a toddler with her parents, fleeing the pogroms. Her father wrote poetry in Hebrew, though she herself, according to Simone’s niece, Sylvie, was “frightfully liberated.” The assimilated couple decided to spare their children any knowledge of their heritage until they were “mature” enough to process the bad news.
If André had strong feelings about being Jewish, he never seems to have aired them, though he married a divorced Catholic and baptized his children at Simone’s urging. The new collection includes her letters to him on the subject, along with an oblique reference, from 1941, to their predicament as refugees: “One could define art’s object as leading the soul to feel at home in the place of its exile.” The ambivalence of André and his parents was culturally unexceptional, but Simone’s abhorrence wasn’t.
A rabid hatred can be a fetish, and it is often a horror of contamination. (Fetishes, according to Freud, are associated with a child’s traumatic discovery of gender differences.) Weil shocked Thibon, he wrote, with an “anti-Semitism” he calls “violent. . . . She was fond of saying that Hitler hunted on the same ground as the Jews and only persecuted them to resuscitate under another name and to his own advantage their tribal god, terrestrial, cruel, and exclusive.” Judaism was “linked to a concept of race,” in her view, so it was not an “authentic” religion. Her biographer Thomas Nevin suggests that she saw being Jewish “as a condition or disease from which one might be relieved.” In policy notes that she drafted for the French government-in-exile, she defended legal discrimination against Jews, and her measures to insure their “disappearance” included an obligatory “Christian” education for their children. Only the “fanatical racists” would hold out, and they could be deprived of their nationality.
The Weils fled Paris in June, 1940, taking the last train heading south before the Germans closed in. After the partition of France into an occupied zone and a so-called free zone, governed from Vichy by Nazi collaborators, they spent the next two years in and around Marseille. Simone studied Sanskrit, did social outreach with Indo-Chinese factory workers barracked in a prison, and joined a Resistance network. Informants, however, had already infiltrated the group. (Biri and Mime waited for hours in a café opposite the gendarmerie while their daughter was interrogated.) When the police threatened to jail her “with the whores” if she didn’t talk, she welcomed the invitation.
Expecting and perhaps hoping to be imprisoned, Weil had packed a go bag of essential items. One of the most indispensable was a tattered copy of the Iliad. In December, 1940, her most famous essay, “The Iliad, or The Poem of Force,” appeared in the illustrious literary journal Cahiers du Sud. Its prose thrums with a lofty, tragic resonance that many of Homer’s translators have strived for. She reads the Iliad as the paradigm for all narratives of carnage since time immemorial, and she arrives at a startling insight that probably would have floored the Greeks—that the epic’s “true hero” is force itself. Humanity’s delusion—its Achilles’ heel, as Weil sees it—is to believe that war results in victory for one side and defeat for the other. “Force,” she writes, “makes a thing of anyone who comes under its sway”—both those who wield it and those who suffer it. “And as pitilessly as force crushes, so pitilessly it maddens whoever possesses, or believes he possesses it.”
Fifteen months later, the Vichy police began coöperating with the Nazis in deporting French Jews, some seventy thousand of whom died in the camps. Weil couldn’t have been unaware of their affliction, and she must have known that Cahiers had risked reprisal for publishing one of them. Yet she denied being Jewish in a sardonic letter to the Vichy authorities after they rejected her application for a teaching job on the basis of newly enacted race laws.
It may not have been by chance that Weil now felt “as close to Catholicism” as she could come. She began reciting the Lord’s Prayer daily. She also sought the community of fellow-believers. At a Dominican monastery, she met Father Joseph-Marie Perrin, a nearly blind priest who played a crucial role in her life—not as the confessor he hoped to be but as a sounding board who made Weil “see intellectual honesty in a new light.” In an extraordinary letter that she called her “spiritual autobiography,” and in which hubris alternates with obedience to fate, Weil tells Perrin that she loves him as a “father and brother” (he was about her age) but that she doesn’t need his guidance because “God himself has taken it in hand.”
Before Perrin left Marseille on a mission to Africa, he made a last attempt to save Weil’s prestigious soul—by entrusting it to a better-read shepherd. She had asked him to find her a job as a “servant on a farm,” and he introduced her to Thibon, a Catholic writer and lay theologian. He and his wife had a farm in the Ardèche, a department north of Avignon with some of France’s most majestic scenery. They agreed to host her, although they were initially wary of this “left-wing Jewess” who was eager to shovel their manure but refused their guest room, insisting on sleeping in a hut. “We disagreed on practically everything,” Thibon said (he wrote speeches for Philippe Pétain, the Vichy chief of state), and she exhausted him by “arguing ad infinitum in an inexorably monotonous voice.” But as he came to know her “deep nature,” it revealed “a limpid mysticism” that he had encountered “in no other human being.” Before Weil left France, she entrusted her journals to him, from which he distilled the thirty-nine short chapters of “Gravity and Grace.” Her meditations on the “meaning of the universe” restate life’s common contradictions as sublime paradoxes. They have an alabaster beauty that the light shines through, and which won’t expire.
Weil’s days with the Thibons were perhaps the happiest she ever knew. If she couldn’t accept the Eucharist, she experienced a beatitude in communion with la France profonde. She urged her parents to buy a farm in the Ardèche, where they could grow their own vegetables, her father could practice medicine, and she could teach. Bernard and Selma thought that a safer plan was to apply for American visas. On May 14, 1942, the family left Marseille for Casablanca, where they were interned for almost three weeks with other Jewish refugees before boarding a freighter for New York. Simone monopolized one of the camp’s few chairs, where she wrote about Pythagoras all day long. If she had to vacate this parking spot for any reason, her parents took turns holding it.
Weil had agreed to emigrate only because her parents wouldn’t leave without her. After a few months in New York, she managed, through the intercession of a well-connected classmate from the Normale, to land a desk job at the London headquarters of de Gaulle’s government-in-exile. She was obsessed with playing a role in liberating France—specifically by carrying out an underground mission whose danger would “release” her from an “annihilating” despair. Recrossing the ocean was the first step in her audacious plan to see action, which had two components, both involving parachutes. One was to be dropped behind enemy lines to conduct sabotage. The other was to organize a company of volunteer nurses who would bring succor to the Maquis. They would all be unmarried women with some basic training in first aid but otherwise unqualified as medics. She envisaged them dressed in white as their chutes opened and they floated earthward—grace surrendering to gravity—unarmed except for their courage. It is said that, when word of her “nurses plan” reached de Gaulle, he exclaimed, “She’s crazy.”
Weil was so bitter at this rejection that she couldn’t get over it. As a consolation, she was given a small private office, and an assignment better suited to her talents than sabotage: reviewing and commenting on plans to reorganize France after the war. The sheer frenzy and volume of what she wrote in a few months, Pétrement marvels, “is almost beyond belief. She must have written day and night.”
Her critiques coalesced into “The Need for Roots”—Weil’s constitution for a Fourth Republic. It analyzes misgovernment not only in France since the Revolution but through millennia of world history. It indicts materialist ideologies. A just society, in her view, should be based not on the “rights” of its citizens but on their sacred “obligations” to one another. Many of her fixes for the rotten state of late-capitalist democracy are radically egalitarian and humane, and she was prophetic about the evils of the present century—the malign influence of biased media that foster groupthink and hate; cynical parties scrabbling for power; the anguish of displaced migrants and laborers; the cultural genocide of Indigenous communities. (“White people have been destroying the past everywhere.”)
Other aspects of “The Need for Roots” are singularly authoritarian. She imagines a utopian nanny state where civic virtue is inseparable from religious indoctrination. Hierarchs possessed of impartial wisdom (how they are chosen she doesn’t say) insure that justice is served and that “everyone morally accepts their place.” Punishment is an “honor” here. “Surgical methods” may be required to treat “social disease.” Freedom of expression is “unlimited” in principle, except for newspapers, magazines, radio, interest groups, and fiction or art that corrupts young people. “The need for truth is more sacred than any other,” so “jail or prison camp” wouldn’t be “too harsh” a sentence for failing to fact-check an article.
The greatest moralists aren’t the didacts. They are writers like Euripides and Chekhov, who know that most of us can’t be saved from ourselves. Weil believed that God had sent his son for that purpose. At the same time, perhaps, her hunger for hardship was the search for an experience of shared reality from which she felt excluded. She wasn’t real to herself as a woman or a Jew. The body that she couldn’t love was a stranger to the appetites that doom utopias. Yet a wounded human heart beats fiercely in everything she writes, and its enigmas speak to us intimately, since no one’s contradictions can be reconciled.
In uprooting herself from France to save Biri and Mime, Weil had severed a primal bond that defined her identity. By leaving them in New York, she had severed a primal bond that had kept her alive. On April 15, 1943, a friend found her barely conscious on the floor of her room in a boarding house and, despite her protestations, took her to a hospital, where doctors discovered that she had tuberculosis. The disease wasn’t far advanced, and there was no reason to believe that an active young woman couldn’t recover with sufficient bed rest and nutrition. But the patient refused to eat more than minute quantities of food—an egg yolk, a peach, a spoonful of soup—and in her final days, by which time she had been transferred to a sanitarium in Kent, she took nothing at all. On August 24th, she died in the extremis that had always been her soul’s discomfort zone. “Salvation,” she wrote, “is consenting to die.” The coroner ruled her death a suicide.
Life wasn’t precious to Weil; she was never precious to herself. Yet she knew that she was precious to her parents, and the white lies in her last letters to them, all of which have her boarding-house return address, are what moves one most in the new collection. “I had a nice surprise here in terms of the food,” she writes from the hospital, where she is fighting with doctors who are trying to save her life by force-feeding her. “Roast pork with apple sauce . . . the pure flavor of an apple constitutes a contact with the beauty of the universe in the same way as does contemplation of a painting by Cézanne.” Three weeks later, in a letter from the Kent sanitarium (“I’m still living nice and quietly in my room, with my books scattered between it and my office”), she describes the London summer: “The hot days are back. . . . In the evenings, people dance in the open air in parks.”
Then she corrects a piece of “false information” that she had previously conveyed about an ersatz sweet called a “fruit fool”: “But these fools are not like the ones in Shakespeare. They’re lying by making people believe they’re fruit, while in Sh. the fools are the only characters who tell the truth.” In “this world,” she continues, that privilege is given only to the lowest and most afflicted—those without the “dignity of reason” in the eyes of people who call them mad. Didn’t her “Darling Mime” see the resemblance “between these fools and me”? ♦
