WEIL, SIMONE

French-Jewish writer, a radical in her social and political thinking, but drawn toward Catholicism (pseudonym Emile Novis); b. Paris, 1909; d. Ashford, England, Aug. 24, 1943. Weil was the daughter of a physician of the Parisian bourgeois milieu. Her childhood was happy, but World War I sharpened precociously her sensitivity to the miseries of man. The genius of her brother, Andrew ("his childhood was comparable to that of Pascal") stimulated her passion for the truth. She was attracted from her ninth year to Bolshevism, became an anarchist, and helped Trotsky. Simone was a student of Alain (Emile Chartier, 1868–1951), entered the Ecole Normale Supérieure, and earned the agrégée in philosophy. Weil taught at Le Puy, Roanne, Bourges, and then, obtaining leave, became a worker, and took part in the social movements and strikes of 1936. After that she involved herself with anarchists in the civil war in Spain.

Her position was strictly agnostic and anticlerical in 1938, when, on a visit to Solesmes, "Christ took hold of her." From then on she believed in His love and divinity and discovered the meaning of the Passion. Anti-Semitic decrees brought her to Provence where she met Father J.M. Perrin and worked as an agricultural laborer while a guest of G. Thibon. Then she discovered the relation of prayer to God and the Eucharist, but, beset by tormenting intellectual problems, did not enter the Church. She remained "waiting for God."

With her parents, she went to the U. S. to join her brother in the summer of 1942. She then returned to Free France and went to London in November. She obstinately shared the privations of the war and died the following August in a state of exhaustion.

Weil had an ardent compassion for the unfortunate, a great desire for the truth, and an eagerness to search out the will of God. Spiritually, she was torn by the conflict she felt between the attraction of Christ, of the Eucharist, and of the Gospel, on the one hand; and, on the other, the social, philosophical, and historical objections that oppressed her. In these the major lacunae in her knowledge are evident.

Bibliography: j. m. perrin and g. thibon, Simone Weil as We Knew Her, tr. e. craufurd (London 1953). g. fiori, Simone Weil: An Intellectual Biography, tr. j. r. berrigan (Athens, Ga. 1989). r. h. bell, Simone Weil: The Way of Justice as Compassion (Lanham, Md. 1998). m. vetÖ The Religious Metaphysics of Simone Weil, tr. j. dargan (Albany, N.Y. 1994).

[j. m. perrin]