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Simone Weil
The Uncompromising Christian
Turning her face to avoid the scorching blast, she slid the tray of huge copper bobbins into the inferno. A few minutes later, lifting the lid of the furnace with a large hook, she pulled the red-hot bobbins from the flames and then repeated the process again, over and over, stopping only for one fifteen-minute lunch break. For more than eight hours every day, she bent over the furnace, her pay dependent on the number of pieces finished. “Upon taking up your post at the machine you must kill your soul . . . kill your thoughts, feelings, everything,” she wrote in her journal about her work on the factory assembly line. “You must suppress, purge yourself of all of your irritation, sadness, or disgust; they would lessen the pace. You must even abolish joy.”1 The most puzzling aspect of this scenario was that the factory worker who penned these words was an affluent, highly educated professor of philosophy. Simone Weil was not forced by poverty to toil on the assembly line; she deliberately chose to be there.
Born in Paris in 1909 to wealthy Jewish parents, Simone Weil was an intelligent child. By the time she was five years old, she was routinely reading the daily newspaper aloud to her family. She mastered Greek and several other modern languages in her early teens and would often speak in rhymed couplets or ancient Greek with her older brother, Andre, who was a brilliant mathematician. Because their mother deemed few educators skilled enough to teach her children, both Simone and Andre attended more than a half dozen schools and were instructed by several private tutors during their elementary and secondary school years.
From a very young age Simone also exhibited a heart for the world’s poor and suffering. When she was six, she gave up sugar in an act of solidarity with the soldiers fighting in World War I, and she later befriended and mailed care packages to a French soldier on the front lines. When she was ten, while on vacation with her family, Simone gathered the chambermaids, porters, and desk clerks at the hotel and urged them to form a trade union. A few months after the end of World War I, her parents discovered her marching alongside workers in a union demonstration, singing “The Internationale” and chanting for better wages and hours.
At age sixteen Simone enrolled in the prestigious Lycée Henri IV, where she studied French, English, history, and philosophy. She was strongly influenced by her philosophy instructor, Émile Chartier, better known as Alain, who encouraged her writing and invited her to submit essays to the journal he published. Under his tutelage, Simone adopted Alain’s central beliefs in intellectual responsibility, social justice, and, most important, the spiritual potential in manual labor. Upon graduation, Alain noted that his star student was “an excellent pupil” with a “rare strength of mind.” He predicted Simone would “succeed brilliantly if she does not embark on obscure paths,” and that she would attract much attention along the way.2
Attract attention she did indeed. Around the time she entered the lycée, Simone adopted an unusual fashion style that she adhered to for the rest of her life. With an unruly mop of black hair; huge tortoiseshell glasses that dwarfed her delicate features; and clothing resembling that of a destitute monk, with a dark cape, an ankle-length skirt, and boyish, flat-heeled shoes, Simone stood out as unusual and a bit bizarre. For her, style was a political expression. “It would be better if everyone dressed the same way and for the same amount of money,” she told a teenaged friend. “That way . . . nobody would see our differences.”3 Adding to the effect was the fact that Simone was frightfully thin, due to her practice of severely limiting portions or abstaining from food altogether to make a political statement. Some scholars claim that she suffered from anorexia, and hospital records indicated that severe malnourishment was a contributing factor to her premature death from heart failure at the age of thirty-four.
“More Beautiful Than the Bourgeois”
Simone also took Alain’s philosophy of manual labor to heart. While enrolled at the Sorbonne, she spent her summer vacations not lounging on the beach with her family but digging potatoes for ten hours a day at a Normandy farm and fishing off the coast with a four-man crew. She believed in a proto-Marxist view of work, concluding that manual labor was the truest road to self-knowledge and truth.
One day, sitting next to a friend on the subway, Simone pointed to a man wearing factory overalls, noting, “You see, it’s not just in a spirit of justice that I love them. I love them naturally, because I find them more beautiful than the bourgeois.” When another friend pointed out that she was the daughter of wealthy parents, Simone answered, “That’s my misfortune, I wish my parents had been poor.”4
Yet for Simone, work wasn’t simply a philosophy. She believed in its value and lived it. By the time she had accepted a job teaching philosophy in the French lycée system, she was known as the Red Virgin and had aligned herself with the working class. She regularly wrote for several left-wing publications, organized and participated in worker strikes, campaigned for better working conditions, and taught night classes to miners, in addition to her daily teaching responsibilities at the lycée.
Finally, in 1934, Simone made a dramatic move when she decided to take an unpaid sabbatical from the lycée system to work in a factory. She moved out of her parents’ spacious apartment and rented a tiny maid’s room, vowing to live exclusively on what she earned on the grueling assembly line. As was often the case with Simone, she took her pledge to the extreme. When she visited her mother and father for Sunday supper, she left what she estimated to be the cost for her meal on their dining room table. The gesture irritated her parents, who, though they supported her, could never quite understand or accept their daughter’s radical choices.
Taken Possession
Although her parents were Alsatian Jews who had moved to Paris after Germany’s annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, they were also self-proclaimed atheists. As a result, Simone was raised in a nonreligious household. Simone later claimed her year in the French factories as one of the most pivotal in her life, not only because of the political lessons she drew from her months on the assembly line, but also because of the impact of the experience on her spiritual life. It was during this time that the first subtle references to her personal spiritual transformation began to emerge in her writing. She wrote that during those months in the factory, she felt that she had “no right to anything, that every moment of suffering and humiliation must be received as grace.”5 Later, she described the experience to her spiritual mentor, the Dominican priest Father Joseph-Marie Perrin, this way: “Until then . . . I knew quite well that there was a great deal of affliction in the world, I was obsessed with the idea, but I had not had prolonged and firsthand experience of it. As I worked in the factory . . . the affliction of others entered into my flesh and my soul.”6
Shortly after her year of factory work, Simone experienced her first real moment of conversion. While vacationing with her parents in Portugal, she watched a candlelight religious procession in the town square of the small fishing village. As she listened to the fishermen and their wives sing “ancient hymns of heart-rending sadness,” she was suddenly gripped by the conviction that “Christianity is preeminently the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and I among others.”7 Unsure of what to do with this epiphany, she kept the knowledge to herself.
Two years later, in 1937, Simone experienced a second conversion moment while visiting the Chapel of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Assisi, where Saint Francis used to pray. Years later, she described the experience to Father Perrin, noting, “something stronger than I was compelled me for the first time in my life to go down on my knees.”8 Again, though, at the time it happened she largely kept quiet about the experience, unwilling to admit to others, and perhaps to herself, that she was moving toward a commitment to Christianity.
Finally, a year later, while meditating on a poem by the sixteenth-century poet George Herbert, she was struck once and for all by the magnitude of Christ’s love. As she repeated the memorized stanzas to herself, Simone reported later, “Christ himself came down and took possession of me.”9 While she would never completely abandon her political and philosophical writing, this was the moment that prompted Simone to turn her full attention to theology.
Heretic or Theologian?
Simone later acknowledged that she believed she had been a Christian from the start. “I always adopted the Christian attitude as the only possible one,” she wrote in her posthumously published collection of essays, Waiting for God. “I might say that I was born, I grew up and I always remained within the Christian inspiration. . . . From my earliest childhood I always had also the Christian idea of love for one’s neighbor, to which I gave the name of justice.”10 While she may have “adopted a Christian attitude” and “remained within the Christian inspiration,” Simone was not technically a Christian, at least by the church’s definition, because she refused to be baptized and resisted much of the Roman Catholic Church’s doctrine. As biographer Stephen Plant observes, “Weil’s understanding of God and what it means to live within the ‘Christian inspiration’ diverged greatly from what was acceptable to a priest like Perrin.”11
In addition to refusing baptism, Simone also expressed little concern for salvation. At one point she even declared, “The Cross alone suffices. If the Gospel totally omitted any reference to Christ’s resurrection, faith would be far easier for me.”12 Biographer Francine Du Plessix Gray wryly notes that perhaps the concept of the resurrection was too joyful for Simone, who led the life of an ascetic and avoided pleasure at all costs. In addition, Simone could not accept the church’s history of excommunicating those whose theology did not align perfectly with its doctrine. “I love God, Christ and the Catholic faith as much as it is possible for so miserably inadequate a creature to love them,” she wrote to Perrin. “I love the Saints through their writings. . . . I love the Catholic liturgy, hymns, architecture, rites and ceremonies. But I have not the slightest love for the Church in the strict sense of the word.”13 She was, in a word, uncompromising in her view of the church.
At one point Simone detailed her issues with the church in a thirty-two-page letter to another priest and confidant, Father Couturier. She argued that divine revelation was not limited to Christianity but rather was embodied in a great many other world religions practiced in India, Babylonia, Greece, Egypt, Druid civilizations, and China, long before the advent of Christianity. One notable exception in her list of religions was Judaism. Perhaps biased by her Jewish atheist parents, Simone wrote very critically of the religion of her ancestors. So critically, in fact, many scholars have accused her of anti-Semitism. “I have never been able to understand how it is possible for a reasonable mind to look on the Jehovah of the Bible and the Father who is invoked in the Gospel as one and the same being,” she wrote. “The influence of the Old Testament and of the Roman Empire, whose tradition was continued by the Papacy, are to my mind the two essential sources of the corruption of Christianity.”14 Statements such as this one guaranteed that Simone would never be allowed as an official member of the Catholic Church, and it’s not a surprise that on more than one occasion she was labeled a heretic.
The fact is, this “spiritual freelancer,” as Gray calls Simone, wove together threads from a multitude of diverse cultures in order to come to an understanding of God that, while suitable to her, was very much outside the norms of church doctrine. As Gray notes, just as a wide variety of thinkers influenced Simone’s philosophy, from Plato and Descartes to Spinoza, Pascal, and Kant, her understanding of God and religion cannot be traced to a single source.
Why then, one might ask, is Simone Weil so important to include in a compilation of Christian women? After all, she wasn’t officially a Christian, at least as sanctioned by the Roman Catholic Church. Yet Simone Weil gives us much to ponder. Her questions and statements may startle, they may cause unease, but they also dig deeply into issues of social, ethical, and spiritual importance—issues that are as critical today as they were in the early part of the twentieth century. As biographer Stephen Plant so succinctly states, “Weil belongs to those Christian thinkers who leave aside peripheral issues and take us instead to the few most important questions about God and about life.”15 To dismiss Simone Weil’s ideas because they make us uncomfortable, or because they don’t fit neatly into our own definition of Christianity, would be a disservice not only to her but to ourselves as well.