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.
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.)
