WEIL, SIMONE

WEIL, SIMONE (1909–1943), essayist and religious mystic. Born in Paris of secularized Jewish parents, Simone Weil was part of a family whose outstanding trait was intellectual precocity. As a student at France's École Normale, a school noted for its lofty intellectualism and academic rigor, she scored highest on a nationwide entrance examination and in 1931 graduated with the highest rank. The most remarkable quality of this woman, beyond her surpassing intellectual brilliance, was her disposition to extend herself physically in following her sympathies. She also suffered from excruciating headaches, which added to the frailty and exhaustion that came from nervous disability and undernourishment.

From 1931 to 1934, Weil taught school in several French towns and engaged in political activity in behalf of unemployed and striking workers. This political activity, together with her eccentricities of dress and manner, did not make for a successful teaching career. Weil's growing concern with Marxism led her to take a job in a Paris factory, which she stayed with only four months. In 1936 she went to Spain to join Loyalist frontline troops as a battalion cook, but colossal ineptitude for this work, plus a growing conviction that neither side wore the mantle of righteousness, led to her withdrawal from this venture as well.

Beginning in 1937, after several mystical experiences, she became a Christian, relating that in one of these experiences "Christ himself came down and he took me." After this experience her writing was largely concerned with religion. Weil did not write any books. What we know about her thought comes from her letters, journal, and essays, which may account for the lack of a coherent and developed statement of her religious views. The closest she came to a formal religious affirmation was to the Roman Catholic church but, curiously, she refused its baptism, partly on the grounds that Christianity claimed the Old Testament as the foundation of its truth. She rejected this because she felt that the Old Testament contained too much of war and was too tribal to sustain the Catholic claim to universality.

As a thinker in religion Weil is especially significant for her insights into the effect of mass material culture on the human spirit, especially in terms of the vitiating of freedom and the fragmenting of the idea of community. She died in England during World War II from what is now presumed to have been anorexia nervosa.

Bibliography

The best statement of sources on Weil is "Simone Weil's Bibliography: Some Reflections on Publishing and Criticism" by George Abbott White in his Simone Weil: Interpretations of a Life (Amherst, Mass., 1981). See also John Hellman's Simone Weil (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1982).

William D. Miller (1987)