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 Looking
into the Void:
The Sacrificial Faith of Simone Weil
by Susan Hanson
Portrait
of Simone Weil by Sally Markell
Considered
by Nobel laureate André Gide and others to be “the
most truly spiritual writer” of the 20th century, Simone Weil
would no doubt be confounded by all the fuss. “I never read
the story of the barren fig tree without trembling,” she confessed
in a letter to her friend and mentor Father Joseph-Marie Perrin
in 1942. “I think that is a portrait of me.”
 Indeed,
Weil wanted nothing so much as to lose her self altogether. “May
God grant that I become nothing,” she wrote in a notebook
entry that would later be included in Gravity and Grace.
“We must become nothing, we must go down to the vegetative
level; it is then that God becomes bread.”
An
unlikely candidate for sainthood by anyone’s standards, Simone
Weil was paradox embodied:
she considered herself a Christian—a Catholic, to be more
precise—yet she came from a secular Jewish home and was never
baptized; she was a pacifist but fought in the Spanish Civil War;
she was a brilliant intellectual known for her anti-intellectualism,
a member of the bourgeoisie who worked on a French assembly line
for a year, a person who loved life and yet longed for—some
would say hastened—her own death.
Born
in Paris in 1909, Simone Weil was “peculiar,” to use
biographer David McLellan’s term, almost from birth. At the
age of three, for example, she supposedly refused a cousin’s
gift of an expensive ring by saying, “I do not like luxury.”
And just two years later, with the outbreak of the war in 1914,
she gave up sugar and other hard-to-find foods as an act of solidarity
with the soldiers.
As
Weil would later admit, her belief in the value of sacrifice was
shaped in great part by a story she heard as a child. Sitting at
the bedside of her three-and-a-half-year old daughter, who was in
the hospital recovering from surgery for appendicitis, Selma Weil
entertained Simone with the tale “Marie in gold and Marie
in tar.” As Weil friend and biographer Simone Pétrement
explains,
The
heroine of this fairy tale, who was sent by her stepmother into
the forest, reaches a house where she is asked whether she wants
to enter by the door in gold or the door in tar. ‘For
me,’ she replies, ‘tar is quite good enough.’
This was the right answer and a shower of gold fell on her.
When her stepmother saw her bring back gold, she then sent her
own daughter into the forest. But when asked the same question,
her daughter chose the golden door and was deluged with tar.”
For
Weil, “tar”—whether in the form of physical suffering
or intellectual obscurity—was always “quite good enough.”
A precocious
child who was memorizing passages from Cyrano de Bergerac
at the age of five and calling herself a Bolshevik by age ten, Simone
Weil nevertheless saw her own abilities as mediocre compared to
those of her mathematically gifted brother, André, who was
older by almost three years. “The exceptional gifts of my
brother, who had a childhood and youth comparable to those of Pascal,
brought my own inferiority home to me,” she wrote in a letter
to Father Perrin shortly before leaving France in 1942. “I
did not mind having no visible successes, but what did grieve me
was the idea of being excluded from that transcendent kingdom to
which only the truly great have access and wherein truth abides.”
This
lack of self-esteem notwithstanding, Weil was a brilliant student
of philosophy, becoming an academic legend even before completing
her work at the École Normale Supérieure in 1931.
It was also during her years at the university that Weil became
politically active, particularly on issues of peace and economic
justice. So intense was her commitment, in fact, that many of her
classmates found her “extremely off-putting.” As an
illustration, David McLellan cites the following comment from a
fellow student: “We tried to avoid her in the corridors because
of the blunt way she had of confronting you with your responsibilities
by asking for your signature on a petition . . . or a contribution
for some trade union strike fund.” Though
remembered by many for her humor and kindness, Simone Weil was nonetheless
seen as a misfit—socially inept, physically awkward, and given
to a style of dress that confirmed this negative image.
Following
her graduation, Weil worked sporadically as a teacher of philosophy
at a series of girls’ lycées. Her career was short-lived,
however, not only because of her unorthodox—and largely unsuccessful—teaching
methods, but also because of her passion for workers’ rights;
between 1933-1937, she took an extended leave of absence, first
to experience life as a factory worker and then to join a group
of anarchists fighting in the Spanish Civil War. In Aragon, too,
her ungainliness quickly became an issue. Because of her poor marksmanship,
she was assigned to the camp cook, with whom she served until accidentally
stepping into a pot of hot grease and being sent away from the front
for treatment.
It
was during the following year, which she spent on sick leave, that
Weil traveled to Italy, a country whose art and music brought her
great joy. Spiritually, too, she was feeling a new sense of life.
As she put it to Father Perrin following her visit to a chapel in
Assisi, “[S]omething stronger than I has compelled me for
the first time in my life to go down on my knees.” Equally
powerful was her chance meeting in Solesmes, France, with a young
English Catholic who introduced her to 17th century metaphysical
poetry, most specifically George Herbert’s poem “Love.”
Memorizing the lines, she would recite them again and again as a
prayer. “It was during one of these recitations,” she
later wrote to Perrin, “that, as I told you, Christ himself
came down and took possession of me.”
Meanwhile,
Weil’s health, fragile since childhood, continued to deteriorate.
Years of self-deprivation, her chief means of identifying with the
poor, had left her weak and increasingly vulnerable to illness.
Rather than lamenting her condition, however, she considered her
suffering to be a necessary step in her quest for truth. By renouncing
the “I,” she believed, she was making room in her soul
for God, the ultimate truth.
With
the German occupation of France, and the mounting pressure on the
Jews, Weil and her family immigrated to New York in 1942. As Leslie
Fiedler put it, though, “America proved intolerable to her;
simply to be in so secure a land was, no matter how one tried to
live, to enjoy what most men could not attain.” Longing to
serve with the French Resistance, Weil finally succeeded in being
assigned to the office of the Free French in London, where once
again she showed her compassion for the suffering of Europe by refusing
to eat. Collapsing in April 1943, Weil was diagnosed with tuberculosis
and sent to a sanatorium to recuperate. Though doctors were confident
that she could recover, Weil ignored their recommendations of food
and rest, essentially dying of starvation that August.
In
the last years of her life in particular, Simone Weil increasingly
found comfort in a God whom she described as “absent,”
and in a consolation that wore the guise of suffering. “God
gave me being in order that I should give it back to him,”
she wrote in Gravity and Grace. “[H]e who gives us
our being loves in us the acceptance of not being.” Like John
the Baptist before her, Weil believed that “[h]e must increase,
but I must decrease.”
Spiritual
pilgrim though she was, Simone Weil remained outside the church
to the end. Even in her attraction to Catholicism, she could not
limit God to any dogma or creed; the very certainty of faith was
for her a luxury to be shunned. For Weil, it was enough to gaze
toward the empty place left by a God who was always just out of
sight. “Attention animated by desire is the whole foundation
of religious practices,” she wrote in “Forms of the
Implicit Love of God.” “[L]ooking is what saves us.”
Not possessing, not consuming, not controlling, but simply watching
and waiting, expecting nothing, surrendering all.
What
may be most admirable—and challenging—about Simone Weil
is the ability she had to forego many of the assurances most of
us demand. Content to live without certainty, she sought God in
the darkness of faith, claiming nothing for herself. To
Weil, what mattered was not finding or even seeking God, but simply
waiting with open eyes, “looking” into the void.
I have
no doubt that were she alive today, Simone Weil would be considered
emotionally disturbed. Highly gifted, yet insecure, she often acted
compulsively—and seldom in her own best interest. Rather than
enjoying the life of privilege to which she was born, she chose
to live in the midst of poverty and war; instead of fleeing from
danger, she let herself be drawn into its heart, into a place where
she could know the suffering wrought by injustice, violence, and
hate.
Was
she anorexic? By today’s standards, that would seem to be
the case. Did she hasten her own death? To think otherwise would
be to discount the facts. Psychologically healthy or not, however,
Simone Weil also knew in some organic way that to desire God without
the safety of dogma was to be possessed by God in return. Suffering
for its own sake was debasing and cruel, but suffering with others
was a means of encountering the divine.
Reflecting
on the complex journey of Simone Weil, we are called to examine
our own spiritual paths:
•
Where do I find paradox or contradiction in the things I believe
and do?
• In what ways do I look to religious practice as a means
of avoiding God?
• Does redemptive suffering have a place in my life? If
so, where? How do acts of solidarity with the sick, the poor,
and the friendless make a difference in the world?
• How does God use my weaknesses and shortcomings as a means
of grace in the world?
copyright
©2005 Susan Hanson.
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