If you want to learn about finding gratefulness in unlikely places, you will find few greater mentors than Simone Weil. With profound empathy she entered again and again into the experience of the afflicted. She was keenly aware that she could find God in the midst of suffering, “holding one’s hand and pressing it rather hard.” For under the sound of our own lamentations, as Weil came to know, “is the pearl of the silence of God.”
-- Patricia Carlson

“Today it is not nearly enough to be a saint; but we must have the saintliness demanded by the present moment, a new saintliness."

Simone Weil was born in France in 1909; her parents were well-educated, nonreligious Jews. From her early childhood she gave evidence of qualities that would characterize her later life: a brilliant mind, a steel will, and an acutely sensitive conscience. She studied philosophy at the elite L'École Normale Supérieure in preparation for a teaching career. But her intellectual interests ranged over many fields, including literature, history, political theory, and mathematics. For a time she was engaged in the world of radical politics. But she became strongly critical of the authoritarian tendencies of Marxism and the sectarian squabbles of left-wing intellectuals.

Weil taught in a series of high schools where she was regarded as an idiosyncratic but popular teacher. She got herself into some trouble, however, by trying to divide her time with teaching in a labor college and also engaging in trade union activity. Feeling a tremendous need to share the experience of the working class, she took a year's leave of absence from her job to work in a series of factories. In 1936 she again left her teaching to join the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, where she served with an anarchist brigade. Her life was probably spared by an accidental injury that forced her return to France.

Weil's life was marked by many instances of her impulse to sacrifice and to share the suffering of others. In retrospect it is possible to interpret her various intellectual and political explorations as steps on a deeply spiritual quest. Nevertheless, a significant turning point in her life came in the late 1930s through a series of experiences that brought her latent spiritual inclinations to the fore. While watching a religious procession in a Portuguese fishing village she felt the conviction arise within her "that Christianity is preeminently the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and I among others." Later in a chapel in Assisi she felt, for the first time, the compulsion to fall to her knees in prayer. And then in 1938 came the experience that "marked her forever." She was spending Holy Week at the Benedictine monastery in Solesmes, following the liturgical services. At the time she was suffering a particularly devastating round of headaches, a condition to which she was prone. In the darkness of the chapel she recited the poem "love" by the English metaphysical poet George Herbert, trying, through a tremendous effort of attention, to identify the pain she was suffering with the passion of Christ. In this effort she suddenly felt that "Christ himself came down and took possession of me."

From that time on her thinking became increasingly Christ-centered. She resumed her study of philosophy, history, and science, but now her angle of vision was trained on the meaning of God's intervention in history through the Incarnation and the cross. She immersed herself in the New Testament, attended Mass, studied the mystics, and brought herself, as she said, to the "threshold of the Church" -- to the point, that is, of struggling for the rest of her life with the question of whether to seek baptism. And yet she did not cross the threshold.

In 1940, as a Jew, she was fired from her teaching position by the Vichy government. She went to Marseilles with her family and sought work in the countryside harvesting grapes. In 1942 she left France and made her way to America. Instantly, however, she regretted the move, feeling her place was back in France, sharing the suffering of her people. She managed to get as far as England, where she contributed her services to the Free French organization. But her efforts to find a way of getting back into occupied France were rebuffed. In the spring of 1943 she collapsed at her desk. She was hospitalized with tuberculosis, a condition that might have improved had she been willing to cooperate with her treatment. However, she insisted on eating no more than was available, under rationing, to those in occupied France. She died on August 24 at the age of thirty-four.
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"Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand."
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There is no question that Simone Weil considered herself a Christian. "Nothing that is Catholic, nothing that is Christian," she wrote, was alien to her. And yet she chose not to be baptized, convinced that she was thus obedient to a vocation to be a Christian outside the church -- to place herself at the intersection of Christianity and all that stands outside. "I cannot help wondering whether in these days when so large a proportion of humanity is submerged in materialism, God does not want there to be some men and women who have given themselves to him and to Christ and who yet remain outside the church." She could not bear the thought of separating herself from the "immense and unfortunate multitude of unbelievers."

There were other reservations that held her back from formal conversion. At heart she was attracted to the pure spirituality she perceived in Greek philosophy and in the Hellenistic dimension of the New Testament; she was in equal measure thoroughly repulsed by everything contaminated, as she saw it, by the spirit of Imperial Rome -- a territorial, legalistic, and nationalistic spirit which she detected in the Catholic church as well.

Weil was by all accounts a difficult and complex person, given to categorical and exasperating judgments. There is much in her writing that shows a distasteful disregard for bodily existence; this, and her philosophical repudiation of the Old Testament, are symptoms of a tendency to gnosticism, which has led some to question whether she was not really farther from orthodox Christianity than she even supposed.

Nevertheless, there is a rarefied integrity to Weil's life that has made her one of the most compelling religious figures of the twentieth century. She represents a type of noninstitutionally sanctioned sanctity, an engaged mysticism that takes into account the pathos of the human condition and the particular horrors of the modern age.

One thinks of her in connection with another French maid, Joan of Arc, who also died among the English. Like Joan she defied the wisdom of the world, clinging to her vision of truth in a spirit of utter purity, obedience, and a humility so extreme that it bordered on arrogance. In any age she would have pursued her vocation with the same determination -- spurred on by a private voice, her own or Another's. In any age, one feels, she would have burned at the stake, whether or her own or another's devising.

Additional Resources
See: Simone Weil, Waiting for God (New York: Harper & Row, 1973); Robert Coles, Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1987).