Simone Weil and the Pursuit of Authenticity

This year marks the seventieth anniversary of Simone Weil’s death. In 1943, still in her thirties, she succumbed to a range of conditions and died in England, not quite alone, but certainly unregarded. Her formidable reputation was to follow.

In many ways this frail, passionate and candid writer was the epitome of the mid-century thinker. In viewing her life, we see almost every contradiction that could possibly characterise the life and times of an intellectual trying to live authentically in a world adrift.

Simone Weil was a philosopher. But she would probably have rejected that description as a single-word summation of her life. She was embroiled in all the major movements of the twentieth century. She was in continuous struggle to think and to act—to feed the hungry, indeed to be one of them, but also to find meaning sufficient to explain human struggle. She was a woman of great intellectual powers, a prodigious capacity for work and an intense need to be involved, to be shaping, to be effectual. In the course of her short life she drifted from atheism to belief and arguably to sainthood; and all of this in thirty-four years.

The end of her life and her most prolific and profound writing coincide with the turning point of the war. She represents all that was at stake in that struggle in that she understood the profound moral questions that the war threw up. These questions included the nature of the evil of which it was a symptom and the radical human freedom which was constitutive of the nature of man and which therefore made this possible. If anyone had insight into the moral origins and conundrums of war, and this war in particular, it was Simone Weil.

Simone Weil was born to an assimilated Jewish bourgeois family on February 3, 1909, the child of a physician and the sibling of Andre Weil, a world- renowned mathematician. Details of her upbringing are sketchy and anecdotal but she did go to the best schools and graduated at twenty-two from the Ecole Normale Superieure with the degree agrégée de philosophie, from which she went to be a schoolteacher in provincial France.

Like many French intellectuals, she became an active Marxist, though she never joined the Communist Party. She tried to involve herself deeply in a variety of movements supporting workers’ rights and participated in union activities. Despite her teaching duties at Le Puy she participated at the age of twenty-four in the General Strike that was called to protest against general wage cuts and then took a year’s leave of absence from teaching to work in a Renault factory. She described herself at this stage of her life as a pacifist. She resumed her teaching and in 1936, doubtless to the horror of her parents, she went to Spain to fight on the side of the Republic and in so doing shed her pacifist sympathies.

Her life was following the familiar trajectory of the bourgeois intellectual anxious to identify with the working class in their rejection and suffering and to live her life in a totally authentic manner. Millions of her contemporaries in the world at the time followed much the same path. As in the case of most of those who went to Spain to defend democracy against the Right, the understanding of the nature of the struggle changed as she experienced first-hand the brutality of the Left and was affected by the idea that she was becoming complicit in it.

Her maturing and change was a familiar story. George Orwell had a similar experience. The mix of idealism, concern for the working class, a rejection of capitalism, suspicion of the Right, the yearning for the collective—all these were part of a mix of ideas circulating among young European and American intellectuals. It largely explains the profile of the members of the International Brigade which was drawn to Spain to join in the struggle against the Nationalists.

One can understand how this war drew Simone Weil to join in and shed her pacifist commitments, as it had drawn many others. At its base was a profound ignorance among the International Brigade of the cynicism and coercive brutality of the Left and particularly of the communist parties which led this struggle. Communism was still relatively new in 1936 and the mass killings of the 1920s and 1930s in the Ukraine and Russia were either not known about or not believed. It was only their first-hand experience of the cynicism and violence of the Left in situations of shared struggle which succeeded in educating this cohort of outsiders. Simone Weil crossed to the other side early in the piece and returned to France with injuries unrelated to the war.

Her political philosophy and her humanism began to mature and be transformed into something entirely new. Philosophically, she had been an inheritor of the nineteenth-century tradition. She had studied Plato. She had an excellent grasp of Ancient Greek and a number of modern European languages. She had come first in the entrance examination for the Ecole (Simone de Beauvoir had finished second). Clearly philosophy was her oeuvre and writing was to be her vehicle. It is hardly surprising that the years following her graduation had been years of attempting to integrate herself into the struggles of the Left in France.

The dominant moral challenges that moved her seemed to lie especially in the region of rights, mostly economic rights and within that mainly those of the working class. Working-class struggle seemed to carry a kind of intrinsic authenticity. She always retained her commitment to the poor, the deprived and the oppressed. This commitment, however, rose above Marxist or socialist ideology and became personal. Her commitment to political reform was slowly transformed into a concern for what we might call moral reform, or at least the moral base that should be the foundation for all politics. Her earlier concern for the working class evolved into a view on suffering, what it meant and what it could mean. Her atheism also began to shift.

Simone Weil’s central preoccupation was not unique to her. It was what has generally been called in modern Western philosophy, “the struggle for authenticity”. She was by no means the first philosopher to attempt to join together the traditional preoccupations of Western philosophy (the person, the cosmos, ethics, consciousness, the soul, logic and so on), with the need to live an authentic life in the flesh. This need arose in the mind of latter-day philosophers from, among other things, the fact of Death. Given that Life was lived in the face of Death, how could one live with passion, meaning and redemptively for others? How could we make our lives count?

The notion that philosophy had been asking the wrong questions—or at least an insufficient question—is traceable back to the Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard (1813–55), whose writings became accessible to European intellectual life in the early part of the twentieth century. Kierkegaard held that the prime question faced by theology (and by extension, philosophy), was that of existence—the fact of existence rather than non-existence. This realisation that we exist is the first datum of philosophy. Our one life has to be lived by us and no one else. Any contemplation of this life generates angst. This angst colours everything about us and raises especially the relationship we have with a God whose existence and demands can never be proved. Living under the strain of the silence of God makes authentic action difficult but necessary since we are by nature free. There follows the next question, the individual’s subjective relationship with the truth. The fact that our existence is delimited by Death gives a definitive shape to our life in the face of Death. Existence is temporal and the individual has one chance to live out the ethical.

Kierkegaard’s model for the full, authentic life (ethical life) is Abraham, who is prepared to abandon the thing he values in life (his son Isaac) in fulfilment of an unethical command of God—to sacrifice that son. In rising to the test, his life is altered forever, shattered by faith in fact, and in this he becomes the Type of faith.

Authenticity and the angst that accompanies its reception and living out, is the basis of the existentialist approach to philosophy. Human consciousness and the self-regarding self necessarily encounter in the world and its worldly forces something which is radically other. Man must act authentically, respond authentically to be authentic. He must be grounded in critical self-reflection. Hence Kierkegaard’s dictum “subjectivity is truth”, by which he means that the individual’s subjective response to the objective determines his ethical stance. Doubt, for example, is part of faith: there is no objective certainty in religious belief: weak faith must engender passionate commitment. Faith, to be authentic, must be a subjective relationship of complete commitment, a leap in the dark in the face of uncertainty. Of this, Abraham is the model.

One might argue that Kierkegaard’s view is a logical extension of Luther’s sola fide—we are maintained in authentic religious belief by faith alone. Certainty is error. But faith, though it may be weak and always accompanied by the angst of uncertainty, is enough—enough to enable us to discern authentic action in any situation where ethical choice is at stake.

If the modern European mind is predominantly concerned with the question of how one can live in a manner which has meaning through authentic choices—and this helps to explain Simone Weil—this central notion is Kierkegaard’s. Being both a theologian and a Lutheran, he was focused on the issue of faith. Faith, and its constructive–destructive potential in the individual life, threw up a central question for the individual: my existence and its possibilities as the central urgent question I must resolve. Existence, that is, must be the focus of any philosophy—Why existence? Why my existence? How am I supposed to exist in the world? Are there differing modes of existence mediated through choices I make? A new theme was injected into European philosophy, that the fact of existence itself was the prime datum of philosophical endeavour—hence existentialism. This became the dominant theme of modern philosophy in the years leading up to the Second World War and afterwards. It is an approach to philosophy thoroughly suited to an age cast adrift in doubt, violence and the threat of death.

Central to Kierkegaard’s theology, and ultimately basic to existentialist philosophy in its non-religious form, is the notion of the leap of faith. Faith is like falling in love: one does not embark on it for reasons of objective judgment and it involves an admixture of doubt. Despite doubt, one leaps into faith in any event and takes the consequences. One has no proof of God, for example, but one takes the journey of faith anyway, carrying one’s doubts with one. To do otherwise is not faith but mere credulity. Christian faith rides on a bedrock of doubt. As far as Christian beliefs and doctrines are concerned, one cannot know the extent to which any of them is true, but the believer commits himself to them anyway because it is the relationship of absolute commitment which defines authentic faith. The exemplar is Abraham, who is asked to sacrifice his only son and who embarks on the journey to fulfil this command in obedience accompanied by angst at the lingering doubt that this unethical command can even come from God. In any event he attempts to follow the command and in the end is spared from carrying it through, this being vindicated through his faith in the face of angst.

Kierkegaard had many followers in the twentieth century, even among post-Christian philosophers. There was resonance in his idea of the individual having to make a choice in sympathy with his realisation of his own existence and the potential for action in accord with the fundamental meaning of life, with the notion that proper action might be accompanied by feelings of angst and the idea that the individual faces a choice between authentic and inauthentic existence framed by choice and characterised by a leap into darkness.

Kierkegaard’s approach to theology, therefore, was picked up by a number of philosophers who followed him in the twentieth century. There is hardly a theologian or a philosopher in modern European history who has not had some debt to Kierkegaard. And so it was with Simone Weil.

She inherited this insight from her philosophical studies, especially under the esteemed “Alain” (Emile Chartier). He encouraged her in the view that philosophy needs to be embedded in actual lived experience. Her work in the Renault factories in 1934–35 was accompanied, typically, by an important essay, “Reflections on the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression”, where she gave a gentle correction to Marx on his notion of technology as the formative driver in culture and the resultant oppression of the worker. Weil agreed that labour grew out of necessity but that this fate, if that is the word, could be countered by a greater degree of ownership by the worker of the process in which he is engaged and the product which results from it. This view later entered her political discourses of 1942 when she worked under de Gaulle on a series of illustrative papers for postwar France. In the meantime, however, her thinking was drifting to an altogether different plane.

Between August 1935 and November 1938, Simone Weil, secular philosopher, religious agnostic and sometime Marxist, experienced a number of religious encounters for which she had no rational explanation and which entirely changed the course of her life. In this period, she evolved from philosopher to mystical theologian, somewhat in the vein of Pascal and certainly to the amazement of all who knew her and were familiar with her writings to that point.

The notion of unmerited and unsought religious consolation is a well-developed theme in Catholic mysticism. It is recorded in a number of celebrated instances, for example in the lives of St Theresa, St John of the Cross and St Ignatius Loyola. Ignatius, the ex-soldier turned traveller-searcher, was journeying in 1522 when, while staying at the village of Manresa on the banks of the River Cardoner, he recorded a sudden, immediate and overwhelming revelation of the nature of God. The revelation was entirely experiential and he could never explain it except in a series of metaphors. Whatever happened, his life after was radically different from that which went before. He says that he learned the interior life of faith by an experience of revelation wholly from outside himself.

The experiences of Simone Weil, improbable as they sound in the twentieth century, were like this. The first happened in Portugal once she had finished working at the factory. As she relates it in Waiting for God:

It was evening and there was a full moon over the sea. The wives of the fishermen were making a tour in procession, carrying candles and singing ancient hymns of heartrending sadness. 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.

The second happened in Assisi, where she was spending two days and where, alone in the chapel of Santa Maria degli Angeli, she described how she was compelled to sink to her knees and, for the first time in her life, to pray.

The third consolation occurred at Solesmes in France where she and her mother were attending Holy Week services, apparently for reasons of art rather than religious content. Here she encountered and was completely taken by the metaphysical poet George Herbert’s famous poem “Love” (Love bade me welcome …): “It was during one of these recitations that … Christ himself came down and took possession of me.”

The sudden movement from the intellectual and the rational to the affective and the intuitive is a universal characteristic of religious mysticism. It appears in the writings of the mystics mentioned above and may be said to be emblematic of the phenomenon of total religious conversion. This is really the mystery at the heart of the life of Simone Weil, and its objective unlikelihood in her life, of all lives, is precisely the authenticating hallmark which distinguishes her life as one of the most intriguing and illuminating of the twentieth century. It is the turning point in her writings.

If one were designing a person to be the model for Christian theology in the most tortured years of the twentieth century, and most especially in the worst years of all, 1939 to 1942, one could hardly come up with a more thoroughly ambiguous candidate than Simone Weil. The times were thoroughly fraught and contending ideologies were waging wars of unprecedented barbarity. But with bewildering suddenness, a widely published culturally Jewish woman whose interests to date had been predominantly the social agenda of the Left, makes a transition to Catholic mysticism while retaining her life’s commitment to the fusion of thought and action. Her sudden grasp of the core of New Testament spirituality is breathtaking. Doubtless, she was assisted in this by her close friendship with a number of French Catholic theologians. And it was the complete absence of Catholic theology in her intellectual upbringing, given that she was not educated a Catholic, which gives her subsequent writings their disconcerting edge.

In a few short years, Simone Weil visited and dealt with in her writing all the classic realms of Catholic theology. These included the nature of the love of God, grace, sin and forgiveness, prayer as attentiveness, atheism as a stage of faith, the absence and silence of God, good and evil, redemptive suffering and many others. Her Protestant contemporary, Karl Barth, dealt with these same areas in about these same years, but Weil’s Pascal-like lightning summations deal with these weighty issues by way of assertion supported occasionally by argument, but the methodology is more attuned to revealing to the reader something he really intuitively already knows. Take the following (from Gravity and Grace) for example:

By redemptive suffering, God is present in extreme evil. For the absence of God is his mode of divine presence—an absence which is felt. He who has not God within him cannot feel his absence …

     As God is present through the consecration of the Eucharist in what the senses perceive as a morsel of bread, so he is present in extreme evil through redemptive suffering through the cross.

God gives himself to men either as powerful or as perfect—it is for them to choose.

When we compare the trajectory of the life of St Ignatius of Loyola with that of Simone Weil, it is hard to conceive a more jumbled counter-type. Ignatius, after the Cardoner experience, went on to Paris to study, founded the Jesuits, which were an instant success, published his theological insights in his Spiritual Exercises and lived a long life of struggle crowned with success. Our other mystic was a creature of the deracinated twentieth century. She was university-educated, a cultural Jew, a farm worker, a factory hand. She taught those on the margins, attempted to be active in the trade union movement, tried anarchistic socialism and Marxism, and in all this sought inclusion in collectives of workers or social groups. It was precisely her exclusion that formed her diamond-hard character. She wrote as the outsider—which perhaps explains why her reception into the church happened only at the end of her life. She was in her own way as much the mystic type of the twentieth century, and especially of the climactic years from 1939 to 1942, as Ignatius was of the sixteenth. 

Simone Weil accompanied her parents to Marseilles in 1940. Working briefly on a local farm, she immersed herself in her theological writings, leaving the manuscripts to be kept safe by Gustave Thibon, the farm’s owner. These were edited and published after the war as Gravity and Grace. They are the core of her theological writings.

She left Marseilles with her parents for New York, where she continued to write while remaining in contact with the Free French in London. From July to November 1942 she wrote extensively, both theology and tracts for the Free French. By now her health was failing as the effects of tuberculosis gradually gained the upper hand inside her always frail body. Nevertheless, her literary output continued and in this last annus mirabilis of 1942–43, she produced The Need for Roots, a text on the nature of man designed to inform the political economy of postwar France. She went to London late in 1942 and within six months was hospitalised with tuberculosis complicated by malnutrition. She died on August 24, 1943, completely unlamented by de Gaulle or any of the others of the Free French who clearly resented this female intellectual, formerly of the Left, and her opinions on the moral state of France now and in their planned future.

Her works are replete with quotable quotes, much like Pascal. They are challenging and succinct. For example:

Every relationship with God begins with an act of mutual forgiveness.

But here is one which captures something of the essence of this highly solitary but socially engaged woman:

Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sign that you will recognise it.