"I was alone,” Simone Weil wrote. “It was evening and there was a full moon over the sea.” In August 1935, Weil was in a small Portuguese village, on “the very day of the festival of its patron saint”.
She describes the scene in <em>Waiting for God</em>: “The wives of the fishermen were, in procession, making a tour of all the ships, carrying candles and singing what must certainly be very ancient hymns of a heart-rending sadness. Nothing can give any idea of it. I have never heard anything so poignant unless it were the song of the boatmen on the Volga. There the conviction was suddenly borne in upon me that Christianity is pre-eminently the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and I among others.”
Three years later, Weil spent Palm Sunday to Easter Tuesday at Solesmes, a Benedictine monastery. Debilitating headaches exhausted her; “each sound hurt me like a blow”. Yet, “by an extreme effort of concentration I was able to rise above this wretched flesh, to leave it to suffer by itself, heaped up in a corner, and to find a pure and perfect joy in the unimaginable beauty of the chanting and the words.”
The experience helped her understand “the possibility of loving divine love in the midst of affliction”. Despite years of growing interest in Christianity, it was only then that “the thought of the Passion of Christ entered into my being once and for all”.
After seeing “the truly angelic radiance” that “clothed” a young English Catholic after he received Holy Communion, Weil took his advice and began to chant the poem <em><a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44367/love-iii"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">Love</mark></a></em> by George Herbert as a way to calm her headaches. “It was during one of these recitations,” she noted, “Christ himself came down and took possession of me.” She was 29 years old.
Five years later, Weil was dead. The manner of her death – like so much of her life – has only contributed to her mystique. Although Weil has become a source of fascination and admiration for Catholics, she was never baptised; she made a conscious decision to not join the Church.
That paradox is at the centre of <em>The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil </em>by Cynthia R Wallace, a necessary volume that affirms the power of Weil’s philosophical and theological thought, and explains her sustained influence.
Wallace begins her book with a sizable list of writers who “attend to Weil”. The list includes Catholics: Seamus Heaney, Mary Karr, Denise Levertov, Czesław Miłosz and Flannery O’Connor. Her particular focus for the book includes poets Adrienne Rich and Katie Daniels, essayist Annie Dillard and novelist Mary Gordon, all of whom – except for Rich – are Catholics.
Among the many who are intrigued by Weil, Wallace observes three sources of fascination. First, they are intrigued by “Weil’s turn towards a Christian God”. Second, they are curious about her “self-sacrificial theory and practice”. Finally, they are drawn to her “practice of attention that manifests what we might call aesthetic and moral seriousness”.
Weil studied philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris; Jean Paul Sartre and Sim-one de Beauvoir studied alongside her. De Beauvoir earned second place in the school’s “General Philosophy and Logic” exam; Weil scored first.<br><br><strong>RELATED: <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/french-soul-searching-begins-as-weird-chaos-of-olympics-opening-ceremony-sinks-in/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">French soul searching begins as weird chaos of Olympics’ opening ceremony sinks in</mark></a></strong>
Her parents were Jewish agnostics, but Weil’s time in Portugal and elsewhere cultivated her fascination with the Church; she was often physically overtaken with Christ. Wallace notes that Weil “resigned herself to remain at the ‘threshold’ of the Church, even as she longed for full communion”.
Weil’s paradoxical relationship with the Church – and her simultaneous “possession” by Christ – makes for an intriguing study. Wallace expertly considers how several women writers have been shaped by Weil, finding her to be an intellectual and spiritual interlocutor.
One particular example is instructive. Essayist Annie Dillard became a Catholic around 1990. “What I like about the Catholics,” she said then, “is that they have this sort of mussed-up human way...You go to a Catholic church, and there are people of all different colours and ages, and babies squalling. You’re taking a stand with these people. You’re saying ‘Here I am. One of those people who love God.’ They’re really universal, really Catholic.”
Dillard’s route towards Catholicism, Wallace shows, was a long one, and documented in books like <em>Pilgrim at Tinker Creek</em> (1974) and <em>Holy the Firm</em> (1977). In the former, Dillard reveals the importance of waiting and attention, as they relate to faith and wonder. “I find it hard to see anything about a bird that it does not want seen. It demands my full attention,” Dillard writes, lines that call to mind the sense of inscape articulated by Gerard Manley Hopkins.
For Wallace, it is <em>Holy the Firm</em> that best reveals Dillard’s engagement with Weil. The book, she posits, “is an example of <em>metaxu</em>, the Greek word Weil borrowed from Plato to describe 'intermediaries' that mediate between the physical and the metaphysical, the human and the divine”. A trenchant example of the idea comes from Weil’s own writing: “Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but it is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link.”
One can see why Weil’s thinking appeals to creative writers: she was a seeker shaped by paradox. Dillard appears since to have left the Church, though still identifying as Christian; itself a subtle affirmation that Weil’s thinking might be more appealing to seekers rather than those who wish for full communion.
“A work of art has an author,” Weil once wrote, “and yet, when it is perfect, it has something which is essentially anonymous about it.” Like the women after her, Weil was in search of an elusive truth: a kenosis – the "self-emptying" of Jesus – of sorts. Her search is worth our continued attention.
<em>Photo of Simone Weil from 'The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil' by Cynthia R Wallace (Columbia University Press, 2024).</em>
<strong><strong>This article appears in the June issue of the <em>Catholic Herald</em>. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/subscribe/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">HERE</mark></a></strong></strong>.
