I find it hard to make public the extraordinary work of Simone Weil. Hitherto I have shared with only a few special friends the joy of knowing her personality and her mind, and now I have the painful impression of divulging a family secret. My one consolation lies in the certainty that through the inevitable profan-ation of publicity her testimony will reach other kindred souls.
I find it still harder to be obliged, in introducing this work, to speak incidentally of myself. Secretum meum mihi: the absence of reticence among many modern writers, the taste for auto-biography and confession, the habit of admitting the public to the innermost recesses of an intimacy stripped of all reserve have never failed to surprise and scandalize me. Yet I owe it to myself—were it solely to justify the appearance of my name at the head of these papers—to explain the exceptional circumstances through which I came to know the real Simone Weil and to have the undeserved honour of presenting her thoughts to the world.
In June 1941 the Reverend Father Perrin, a Dominican friend
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then living at Marseilles, sent me a letter which I do not happen to have kept but which ran more or less as follows: ‘There is a young Jewish girl here, a graduate in philosophy and a militant supporter of the extreme left. She is excluded from the University by the new laws and is anxious to work for a while in the country as a farm hand. I feel that such an experiment needs supervision and I should be relieved if you could put her up in your house.’ I had to think this letter over. Thank God I do not suffer from any a priori antisemitism, but what I know from experience of the qualities and faults of the Jewish temperament does not fit in any too well with my own and is particularly ill-adapted to the demands of everyday life together. There is an equally wide divergence between my instinctive reactions and those of a militant supporter of the extreme left. Moreover I am a little suspicious of graduates in philosophy, and as for intellectuals who want to return to the land, I am well enough acquainted with them to know that, with a few rare exceptions, they belong to that order of cranks whose undertakings generally come to a bad end. My first impulse was therefore to refuse.
The wish to fall in with the suggestions of a friend, an unwillingness to spurn a soul which Destiny had placed in my path, the halo of sympathy surrounding the Jews as a result of the persecutions from which they were beginning to suffer, and, on the top of all this, a certain curiosity, made me change my mind.
A few days later Simone Weil arrived at my house. At first our relationship was friendly but uncomfortable. On the concrete plane we disagreed on practically everything. She went on argu-ing ad infinitum in an inexorably monotonous voice and I emerged from these endless discussions literally worn out. I enveloped myself in an armour of patience and courtesy in order to bear with her. Then, thanks to the privileges of a life which is shared, I gradually discovered that the side of her character which I found so impossible, far from revealing her real deep nature,
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showed only her exterior and social self. In her case the respective positions of being and appearing were reversed: unlike most people she gained immeasurably in an atmosphere of close intimacy; with alarming spontaneity she displayed all that was most unpleasing in her nature, but it needed much time and affection, and a great deal of reserve had to be overcome, before she showed what was best in her. She was just then beginning to open with all her soul to Christianity, a limpid mysticism eman-ated from her; in no other human being have I come across such familiarity with religious mysteries; never have I felt the word supernatural to be more charged with reality than when in contact with her.
Such mysticism had nothing in common with those religious speculations divorced from any personal commitment which are all too frequently the only testimony of intellectuals who apply themselves to the things of God. She actually experienced in its heart-breaking reality the distance between ‘knowing’ and ‘knowing with all one’s soul’, and the one object of her life was to abolish that distance. I have witnessed too much of the daily unfolding of her existence to be left with the slightest doubt as to the authenticity of her spiritual vocation: her faith and detachment were expressed in all her actions, sometimes with a disconcerting disregard for the practical but always with absolute generosity. Her asceticism might seem exaggerated in our century of half-measures where, to use the words of Léon Bloy, ‘Christians gallop with due moderation to martyrdom’ (and, indeed, how great a scandal would be caused today by the eccentric practices of certain medieval saints?); nevertheless, it was free from any emotional excess and it was impossible to discern any change of level between her mortification and her inner life.
Finding my house too comfortable, she decided to live in an old half-ruined farm belonging to my wife’s parents and situated on the banks of the Rhône. Every day she came to work and, when she deigned to eat, she had her meals with us. Though delicate
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and ill (she had suffered all her life from intolerable headaches, and an attack of pleurisy some years before she came to us had left its mark upon her) she worked on the land with tireless energy and often contented herself with blackberries from the wayside bushes for a meal. Every month she sent half her ration coupons to the political prisoners. As for her spiritual gifts, she distributed them with even more lavish generosity. Every even-ing after work she used to explain the great writings of Plato to me (I have never had time to learn Greek thoroughly). She did this with such educative genius that her teaching was as living as an original creation. Moreover she would put the same enthusiasm and love into teaching the rudiments of arithmetic to this or that backward urchin from the village. Her thirst to cultivate minds even led to some amusing misunderstandings. A kind of high-level equalitarianism led her to measure the capabilities of others by her own. There was scarcely anyone whom she did not consider able to receive the highest teaching. I remember a young working-class Lorraine girl in whom she thought she had detected signs of an intellectual vocation and to whom she poured forth at great length magnificent commentaries on the Upanishads. The poor child nearly died with boredom, but shy-ness and good manners prevented her from saying anything… .
In intimacy she was a charming and lively companion; she knew how to joke without bad taste and could be ironical without unkindness. Her extraordinary learning, so deeply assimilated that it could hardly be distinguished from the expression of her inner life, gave her conversation an unforgettable charm. She had a serious fault, however (or a rare quality according to the plane on which we place ourselves): it was to refuse to make any concession whatever to the requirements and conventions of social life. She always used to say everything she thought to everybody and in all circumstances. This sincerity, which was due chiefly to her deep respect for souls, caused her many mis-adventures. They were amusing for the most part, but some of
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them nearly resulted in tragedy at a time when it was not advisable to publish every truth from the housetops.
There is no question here of assessing the historical sources of her thought and the influences which may have affected her.
Apart from the Gospel which was her daily spiritual food, she had a deep veneration for the great Hindu and Taoistic writings, for Homer, the Greek tragedies and above all for Plato, whom she interpreted in a fundamentally Christian manner. On the other hand she hated Aristotle, whom she regarded as the first to prepare a grave for the mystical tradition. Saint John of the Cross in the religious order, and Shakespeare, certain English mystical poets and Racine in the literary one, also left their mark on her mind. Among her contemporaries I can only think of Paul Valéry, and of Koestler in the Spanish Testament, of which she spoke to me with unmixed praise. Both her preferences and her dislikes were abrupt and final. She firmly believed that creation of real genius required a high level of spirituality and that it was impossible to attain to perfect expression without having passed through severe inner purgation. This insistence upon inner purity and authenticity made her pitiless for all the authors in whom she thought she could detect the slightest affectation, the slightest hint of insincerity or self-importance—Corneille, Hugo or Nietzsche for instance. For her the only thing that counted was a style stripped bare of all adornment, the perfect expression of the naked truth of the soul. ‘The effort of expression’, she wrote to me, ‘has a bearing not only on the form but on the thought and on the whole inner being. So long as bare simplicity of expression is not attained, the thought has not touched or even come near to true greatness… . The real way of writing is to write as we translate. When we translate a text written in some foreign language, we do not seek to add anything to it; on the contrary, we are scrupulously careful not to add anything to it. That is how we have to try to translate a text which is not written down.’
After having passed some weeks with me, finding that she was
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treated with too much consideration, she decided to go and work in another farm so that, a stranger among strangers, she might share the lot of real agricultural labourers. I arranged for her to be taken on in the team of grape-gatherers of a large landowner in a neighbouring village. She worked there for more than a month with heroic regularity, always refusing, in spite of the fact that she was delicate and unaccustomed to the task, to spend shorter hours at it than the sturdy peasants who surrounded her. Her headaches were so bad that at times she had the impression of living through a nightmare. ‘One day’, she owned to me, ‘I wondered if I had not died and fallen into hell without noticing, and whether hell did not consist of working eternally in a vineyard… .’
After this experience she went back to Marseilles, where her parents, who had been driven from Paris by the invasion, were living provisionally. I went sometimes to see her there in her little flat with its view stretching endlessly across the magnificent spaces of the sea. Meantime her parents were preparing to leave for the United States. Her devotion to her country in misfortune and her eagerness to share the fate of her persecuted friends made her hesitate for a long time about going with them. She eventually decided to do so in the hopes of being able to pass from there into Russia or England. I saw her for the last time at the beginning of 1942. At the station she gave me a portfolio crammed with papers, asking me to read them and to take care of them during her exile. As I parted from her I said jokingly, in an attempt to hide my feelings: ‘Goodbye till we meet again in this world or the next!’ She suddenly became serious and replied: ‘In the next there will be no meeting again.’ She meant that the limits which form our ‘empirical self’ will be done away with in the unity of eternal life. I watched her for a moment as she was disappearing down the street. We were not to meet again: contacts with the eternal in the time order are fearfully ephemeral.
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On reaching home I went through Simone Weil’s manuscripts. There were a dozen thick exercise books in which day by day she recorded her thoughts. They ware interspersed with quotations in all languages and with strictly personal notes. Until then I had not read anything by her except a few poems and the studies on Homer which appeared in the Cahiers du Sud under the anagrammatical name of Emile Novis. All the writings which are to be read farther on are drawn from these notebooks. I had time to write once more to Simone Weil to let her know how deeply I had been moved by what I read. From Oran she sent me the following letter which, in spite of its personal character, I have ventured to quote in full since it explains and justifies the publication of this book:
‘Dear Friend,
It seems as though the time has now really come for us to say goodbye to each other. It will not be easy for me to hear from you frequently. I hope that Destiny will spare the house at Saint Marcel—the house inhabited by three beings who love each other. That is someting very precious. Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling. I have never yet been able to resign myself to the fact that all human beings except myself are not completely preserved from every possibility of harm. That shows a serious falling short in the duty of submission to God’s will.
‘You tell me that in my notebooks you have found, besides things which you yourself had thought, others you had not thought but for which you were waiting; so now they belong to you, and I hope that after having been transmuted within you they will one day come out in one of your works. For it is certainly far better for an idea to be associated with your fortunes than with mine. I have a feeling that my own fortunes will never be good in this world (it is not that I count on their being better elsewhere; I cannot think that will be so). I am not a
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person with whom it is advisable to link one’s fate. Human beings have always more or less sensed this; but, I do not know for what mysterious reason, ideas seem to have less discernment.
I wish nothing better for those which have come in my direction than that they should have a good establishment, and I should be very happy for them to find a lodging beneath your pen, whilst changing their form so as to reflect your likeness. That would somewhat diminish my sense of responsibility and the crushing weight of the thought that through my many defects I am incapable of serving the truth as I see it when in an inconceivable excess of mercy it seems to me that it deigns to allow me to behold it. I believe that you will take all that as simply as I say it to you. In the operation of writing, the hand which holds the pen, and the body and soul which are attached to it, with all their social environment, are things of infinitesimal importance for those who love the truth. They are infinitely small in the order of nothingness. That at any rate is the measure of importance I attach in this operation not only to my own personality but to yours and to that of any other writer I respect. Only the personality of those whom I more or less despise matters to me in such a domain… .
‘I do not know whether I have already said it to you, but as to my notebooks, you can read whatever passages you like from them to whomever you like, but you must leave none of them in the hands of anyone else… . If you hear nothing of me for three or four years, you can consider that you have complete ownership of them.
‘I am saying all this to you so that I can go away with a freer mind. I only regret not being able to confide to you all that I still bear undeveloped within me. Luckily, however, what is within me is either valueless or else it exists outside me in a perfect form, in a place of purity where no harm can come to it and whence it will always be able to come down again. That being so, nothing concerning me can have any kind of importance.
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‘I also like to think that after the slight shock of separation you will not feel any sorrow about whatever may be in store for me, and that if you should sometimes happen to think of me you will do so as one thinks of a book one read in childhood. I do not want ever to occupy a different place from that in the hearts of those I love, because then I can be sure of never causing them any unhappiness.
‘I shall never forget the generosity which made you say and write to me some of those things which warm and cheer us even when, as in my case, it is impossible to believe them. They are a support all the same—perhaps too much so. I do not know whether we shall be able to go on corresponding much longer.
We must however think of that as unimportant… .’
If I had been a saint I should have been able to accept the offer which this letter contained. I should also have been able to accept it if I had been an utterly despicable individual. In the first case my self would not have counted at all, and in the second it would have been the only thing that did count. As I am neither the one nor the other the question did not arise.
Simone Weil wrote to me again from Casablanca, then a last time from New York. After that the occupation of the free zone by the Germans held up our correspondence. In November 1944, when I was expecting her return to France, I heard from friends we had in common that she had died a year before in London.
Simone Weil was too pure to have many secrets; she spoke of herself as simply as of everything else. It would be quite easy for me by referring to my memories and to our conversations together to give a very good portrait of her from the superficial point of view, a portrait of which the originality would delight all those who love anecdotes and details from actual experience.
The affection I bore her makes that impossible. A brother cannot
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speak about his sister as one writer of another. Moreover, to season such highly spiritual fare with pictorial condiments would result in somewhat bad taste. I will therefore confine myself to outlining the main features of her life before and after our meeting.
She was born in Paris in 1909 and after having been one of Alain’s pupils entered the Ecole Normale Supérieure very young, there to do brilliantly in her agrégation,1 her subject being philosophy. After that she taught in a number of secondary schools and very soon began to take part in politics. It goes without saying that the revolutionary convictions, which she aired with complete disregard for professional or social conventions, brought her into difficulties with the authorities. She rose above such difficulties with calm disdain. To an inspector who threatened her with reports which might have led to her dismissal she smilingly replied ‘I have always considered dismissal as the normal crowning of my career.’ She fought in the ranks of the extreme left, but she never joined any political body, contenting herself with defending the weak and oppressed irrespective of party or race. Wishing to share to the uttermost the lot of the poor, she asked for a holiday and took a job in the Renault works, where, without letting anyone know who she was, she worked for a year on the benches. She hired a room in the workmen’s district and lived entirely on her meagre earnings. An attack of pleurisy put an end to this experiment. At the time of the Spanish War she entered the ranks of the Reds, but she made a point of never using her weapons and was more an animator than a fighter. A physical accident (she inadvertently scalded her feet) necessitated her being brought back to France. In these tragic circumstances, as throughout her life, her parents, to whom she was deeply attached but whom she kept in an agony 1 Competitive examination conducted by the State for admission to posts on the teaching staff of lycées.
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of anxiety by her heroic extravagances, surrounded her with constant care, which certainly put off the inevitable outcome of an existence so free from anything tending to keep it captive in the flesh. ‘The strength which the Karamazovs draw from the lowest part of their nature’ and which keeps man glued to this earth was strangely lacking in her… .
Before recalling Simone Weil’s attitude during the develop-ments which caused the French to be so deeply divided during the years 1940 to 1944, I want to stress the fact that it would be harmful to her memory were the eternal and transcendent part of her message to be interpreted in the light of present-day politics and confused with party quarrels. No faction, no social ideology has the right to claim her. Her love of the people and her hatred of all oppression are not enough to place her among the leftists any more than her denial of progress and her cult for tradition authorize us to class her on the right. She put the same passionate enthusiasm into her political activities as into everything else, but far from making an idol of an idea, a nation or a class, she knew that the social field is above all the abode of what is relative and evil (‘to contemplate the social scene’, she wrote, ‘is as effective a purification as to withdraw from the world, and that is why I have not been wrong in mixing for so long a time in politics’). She knew that in these matters the duty of a supernatural soul does not consist in fanatically embracing a party but in ceaselessly trying to restore the balance by taking the side of the defeated and the oppressed. It was thus that, in spite of her dislike for Communism, she wanted to go to Russia when that country was bleeding under the heel of the Germans. This idea of counterbalancing is essential in her conception of political and social activity: ‘If we know in what direction the scales of society are tilted we must do what we can to add weight to the lighter side. Although the weight may be something evil, if we handle it with this motive we shall perhaps not be tainted by it. But we must have a conception of equal balance and be always ready to
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change sides like Justice—that fugitive from the camp of conquerors.’
At the time of the Armistice this state of mind inclined her towards the movement of divers origins and ends which is now referred to under the global term of Resistance. Before she left for America she had had a bone to pick with the police of the French State and there is no doubt as to what would have been her fate if she had still been in France at the time of the great Gestapo raids. As soon as she reached the United States she took steps to become enrolled in the forces of the Resistance. She left for London in 1942 and worked there for some time under M. Maurice Schumann. She begged persistently to be sent on a mission to France, but her racial type was too recognizable to allow of this. Being unable to expose herself to the dangers which then hung over the lives of the French, she wanted at least to share their privations and strictly kept to rations which never exceeded the amount allocated by food coupons in France. This diet soon got the better of her health which, even to start with, was variable. Worn out with hunger and phthisis, she had to go into hospital. There she suffered acutely on account of any special comforts which were ordered for her. I had already noticed this characteristic when she was at my home: she had a horror of being given privileges and fiercely shook herself free from any watchful care which aimed at raising her above the common level. She only felt at ease on the lowest rung of the social ladder, lost among the masses of poor folk and outcasts of this world. She was moved to the country and died there after having shown her joy at once more seeing Nature. I have no details of her end. ‘The death agony’, she once said, ‘is the supreme dark night which is necessary even for the perfect if they are to attain to absolute purity, and for that reason it is better that it should be bitter.’ I dare to think that her life had been hard enough for her to have been granted a peaceful passage.
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Simone Weil’s writings belong to the category of very great work which can only be weakened and spoilt by a commentary.
My sole reason for introducing these texts is that my friendship with the author and the long conversations we had together clear away my difficulties in entering into her thought and make it easier for me to replace in their exact setting and their organic context certain formulae which are too bald or need to be elaborated. We must, in fact, remember that we are here concerned, as in Pascal’s case, with simple waiting stones set out day by day, often hurriedly, with a view to a more complete building which, alas! never came into being.
The texts are bare and simple1 like the inner experience which they express. No padding is interposed between the life and the word; soul, thought and expression form one block with no joins in it. Even if I had not known Simone Weil personally, her style alone would in my opinion guarantee the authenticity of her testimony. What is most striking in these thoughts is the comprehensiveness of their possible applications; their simplicity simplifies everything they touch; they transport us to those summits of being from which the eye embraces in one glance an infinity of horizons one above the other. ‘We must welcome all opinions,’ she used to say, ‘but they must be arranged vertically and kept on suitable levels.’ Again: ‘Whatever is real enough to allow of superposed interpretations is innocent and good.’ This sign of greatness and purity is found on every page of her work.
Here for instance is a thought which wipes out the ancient quarrel between optimism and pessimism—that quarrel which Leibniz could not settle: ‘There is every degree of distance between the creature and God. A distance in which the love of God is impossible: matter, plants, animals. Evil is so complete 1 This is the explanation of certain repetitions and negligences of style which we have scrupulously respected throughout.
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there that it destroys itself: there is no longer any evil: mirror of divine innocence. We are at the point where love is just possible.
It is a great privilege since the love which unites is in proportion to the distance. God has created a world which is not the best possible but which contains the whole range of good and evil.
We are at the point where it is as bad as possible because beyond is the stage where evil becomes innocence.’
Or there is this other thought which throws light on the problem of evil and reaches to the very secrets of divine love: ‘All created things refuse to satisfy me as ends. Such is the extreme mercy of God towards me. And that very thing constitutes evil.
Evil is the form which the mercy of God takes in this world.’
And then there is this abrupt and final refutation of all such philosophers as Schopenhauer or Sartre who argue that the presence of evil in the world justifies a fundamental pessimism: ‘To say that the world is not worth anything, that this life is of no value, and to give evil as the proof is absurd, for if these things are worthless what does evil take from us?’
Or again, we find the law of the insertion of the higher into the lower formulated thus: ‘Every order which transcends another can only be introduced into it under the form of something infinitely small.’ This completes and deepens the law of the three orders of Pascal. The world of life does indeed appear to be infinitely small in the midst of the material world: what do living beings represent when compared to the huge mass of the planet and perhaps of the cosmos? It is the same with the spiritual world in relation to the world of life: there are at least 500,000 living species on the earth, of which only one possesses ‘il ben dell’ intelletto’. And as for the world of grace, it, in turn, appears infinitely small against the mass of our secular thoughts and affections: the gospel illustrations of the leaven and the grain of mustard seed are clear enough evidence of this ‘characteristic of being infinitesimal which belongs to pure goodness’.
Impregnating the whole of Simone Weil’s work is the driving
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force of an intense desire for inward purification which comes out even in her metaphysics and her theology. Stretching out with all her soul towards a pure and absolute goodness of which nothing here below provides her with a proof but which she feels to be more real than anything existing in and around her, she seeks to establish her faith in this perfect being upon a base which no stroke of fortune, no affliction, no surging wave either of mind or matter can shake. For that, it is important before all things to eliminate from the inner life all forms of illusion and compensation (imaginative piety, the ‘consolations’ of religion, a crude faith in the immortality of the self, etc.) which too often usurp the name of God and which are really no more than shelters for our weakness or our pride: ‘We have to be careful about the level on which we place the infinite. If we put it on the level which is only suitable for the finite it does not much matter what name we give it.’
Creation reflects God by its beauty and harmony, but, through the evil and death which abide in it and the blind necessity by which it is governed, it also reflects the absence of God. We have issued from God: that means that we bear his imprint and it means also that we are separated from him. The etymology of the word to exist (to be placed outside) is very illuminating in this respect: we can say we exist, we cannot say we are. God who is Being has in a sense effaced himself so that we can exist: he has given up being everything in order that we might exist; he has dispossessed himself in our favour of his own necessity, which is identical with goodness, to allow another necessity to reign which is alien and indifferent to good. The central law of this world, from which God has withdrawn by his very act of creation, is the law of gravity, which is to be found analogously in every stage of existence. Gravity is the force which above all others draws us from God. It impels each creature to seek everything which can preserve or enlarge it and, as Thucydides says, to exercise all the power of which it is capable. Psychologically it
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is shown by all those motives which are directed towards assert-ing or reinstating the self, by all those secret subterfuges (lies of the inner life, escape in dreams or false ideals, imaginary encroachments on the past and the future, etc.) which we make use of to bolster up from inside our tottering existence, that is to say, to remain apart from and opposed to God.
Simone Weil presents the problem of evil as follows: ‘How can we escape from that which corresponds to gravity in ourselves?’ By grace alone. In order to come to us God passes through the infinite thickness of time and space; his grace changes nothing in the play of those blind forces of necessity and chance which guide the world; it penetrates into our souls as a drop of water makes its way through geological strata without affecting their structure, and there it waits in silence until we consent to become God again. Whereas gravity is the work of creation, the work of grace consists of ‘decreating’ us. God consented through love to cease to be everything so that we might be something; we must consent through love to cease to be anything so that God may become everything again. It is therefore a question of abolishing the self within us, ‘that shadow thrown by sin and error which stops the light of God and which we take for a being.’ Without this utter humility, this unconditional consent to be nothing, all forms of heroism and immolation are still subject to the law of gravity and falsehood: ‘We can offer nothing short of ourselves. Otherwise what we term our offering is merely a label attached to a compensatory assertion of the “I” ’.
In order to kill the self we must be ready to endure all the wounds of life, exposing ourselves naked and defenceless to its fangs, we must accept emptiness, an unequal balance, we must never seek compensations and, above all, we must suspend the work of our imagination, ‘which perpetually tends to stop up the cracks through which grace flows.’ Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness. We must also renounce the past and future,
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for the self is nothing but a coagulation of past and future around a present which is always falling away. Memory and hope destroy the wholesome effect of affliction by providing an unlimited field where we can be lifted up in imagination (‘I used to be’, ‘I shall be’ …), but faithfulness to the passing moment reduces man truly to nothing and thus opens to him the gates of eternity.
The self should be destroyed in us from within by love. But its destruction can also be brought about from without by extreme suffering and degradation. There are vagrants and prostitutes who have no more self-esteem than the saints and whose life is confined to the passing moment. Therein lies the tragedy of degradation. It is irreparable, not because the self which it destroys is precious, for the self is made to be destroyed, but because it prevents God from effecting the destruction himself and robs eternalizing love of its prey.
Simone Weil makes a sharp distinction between this supernatural immolation and all forms of human grandeur and heroism. Here below God is the feeblest and most destitute of beings; his love, unlike that of idols, does not fill the carnal part of the soul; to go to him we have to labour in the void, to refuse every intoxication of passion or pride which veils the horrible mystery of death, and to allow ourselves to be guided only by the ‘still, small voice’ spoken of in the Bible—a voice inaudible to the senses and unnoticed by the self. ‘To say to Christ as Saint Peter did: “I will always be faithful to thee”, is to deny him already, for it is to suppose that the source of fidelity is in ourselves and not in grace. As he was chosen, this denial was made known to all men and to himself. How many others boast in the same way—and never understand.’ It is easy to die for something forceful because participation in force produces an intoxication which stupefies us. But it is supernatural to die for something weak: thousands of men were able to die heroically for Napoleon, whilst Christ in his agony was deserted by his disciples (the
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sacrifice was easier later on for the martyrs, for they were already upheld by the social force of the Church). ‘Supernatural love has no contact with force, moreover it does not protect the soul against the coldness of force, the coldness of steel. Only an earthly attachment, if it has in it enough energy, can afford protection against the coldness of steel. Armour is made of metal in the same way as the sword. If we want a love which will protect the soul from wounds we must love something other than God.’
The hero wears armour, the saint is naked. Now armour, while keeping off blows, prevents any direct contact with reality and above all makes it impossible to enter the third dimension which is that of supernatural love. If things are really to exist for us they have to penetrate within us. Hence the necessity for being naked: nothing can enter into us while armour protects us both from wounds and from the depths which they open up. All sin is an attack against the third dimension, an attempt to bring back to the plane of unreality and painlessness an emotion which seeks to penetrate to the depths. This law is inexorable: we lessen our own suffering to the extent that we weaken our inner and direct communion with reality. At the extreme limit of this process life is entirely stretched out on the surface: we suffer no more except in a dream, for existence, reduced to two dimensions, becomes flat like a dream. This holds good for consolations, illusions, boasting and all the compensatory reactions by which we try to fill up the hollows bitten into us by reality. Every empty place or hollow does in fact imply the presence of the third dimension; it is not possible to enter into a surface, and to fill up a hole is equivalent to taking refuge in isolation on the surface. The adage of ancient physics: ‘Nature abhors a vacuum’, is strictly true in psychology. But this vacuum is precisely what grace needs in order to come into us.
This process of ‘decreation’, which is the only way of salvation, is the work of grace and not of the will. Man does not pull
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himself up to heaven by the hair. The will is only useful for servile tasks; it controls the right use of natural virtues, which are pre-requisites of the work of grace, in the same way as the ploughman’s effort must precede the sowing. But the divine seed comes from elsewhere… . In this realm Simone Weil, like Plato and Malebranche, considers attention to be of far more importance than will: ‘We must be indifferent to good and evil, really indifferent; that is to say, we must turn the light of attention equally on each of them. Then the good will triumph by an automatic phenomenon.’ It is precisely this superior automatism which has to be created; it is not obtained by tightening up the self and ‘going beyond one’s capacity’ ( forçant son talent) for doing good (nothing is more degrading than a noble action performed in an unworthy spirit) but by arriving through self-effacement and love at that state of perfect docility to grace whence goodness spontaneously emanates. ‘Action is the pointer which shows the balance. We must not touch the pointer but the weight.’ Unfortunately it is easier to tamper with the pointer than to alter our own weight in these ‘golden scales of Zeus’.
So, then, religious attention raises us above the ‘aberration of opposites’ and the choice between good and evil—‘Choice, a notion belonging to a low level’. So long as I hesitate between doing or not doing a bad action (for instance, possessing or not such and such a woman who offers herself to me, betraying or not betraying some friend), even if I choose the good I scarcely rise above the evil I reject. In order for my ‘good’ action to be really pure, I must dominate this miserable oscillation so that the righteousness of my outward behaviour is the exact expression of my inward necessity. Holiness is like degradation in this respect1; just as an utterly despicable man does not hesitate to 1 This is the postulate of Hermes: the highest resembles the lowest—a central law of being of which Simone Weil gives endless illustrations in her work. Thus the non-resistance of the saints is outwardly indistinguishable from cowardice; supreme wisdom ends in a sense of ignorance, the motions of grace have the
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possess himself of a woman if his passion demands it or to betray a friend if it is in his interest to do so, a saint has no choice to make about remaining pure and faithful: he cannot do anything else; he goes towards goodness like the bee towards a flower. Goodness which we choose by balancing it against evil has scarcely anything but social value; to the eyes of Him ‘who seeth in secret’ it proceeds from the same motives and is marked by the same vulgarity as evil. Hence the kinship often observed between certain forms of ‘virtue’ and the corresponding sin: theft and the bourgeois respect for property, adultery and a ‘respectable woman’, the savings-bank and waste, etc. Real goodness is not opposed to evil (in order to oppose something directly it is necessary to be on the same level); it transcends and effaces it. ‘What evil violates is not goodness, for goodness is inviolate; only a degraded good can be violated.’
The soul engaged in the pursuit of pure goodness comes up against irreducible contradictions. Contradiction is the criterion of reality. ‘Our life is impossibility, absurdity. Everything that we want is in contradiction with the conditions or consequences which are attached to it. It is because we ourselves are a contradiction, being creatures, being God and infinitely other than God.’ Have countless children, for instance, and you are bringing about overpopulation and war (Japan is a typical case of this); improve the material conditions of a nation and you are in danger of impairing its soul; devote yourself entirely to someone and you will cease to exist for him, etc. Only imaginary good things have no contradiction in them: the girl who wants to have numerous offspring, the social reformer who dreams of the people’s well-being, etc., meet with no obstacles so long as they do not pass on to action; they sail gaily forward in a sea of pure but fictitious goodness; the shock of hitting the rocks is the inevitability of animal instincts. (‘I have become as a beast of burden before thy face’ …), detachment is like indifference, etc.
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signal which wakens them. We must accept this contradiction—the sign of our misery and our greatness—in all its bitterness. It is through fully experiencing and suffering from the absurdity as such of this universe where good and evil are mixed that we attain to the pure goodness whose kingdom is not of this world.
‘That action is pure which we can accomplish by keeping our intention totally directed towards pure and impossible goodness, without disguising from ourselves by any lie either the attraction or the impossibility of pure goodness.’ Instead of filling the space which stretches between necessity and goodness with dreams (faith in God as a temporal father, science, progress …) we must receive the two branches of contradiction just as they are and allow ourselves to be torn asunder by their distance. And it is in this tearing, which is as it were a reflection in man of the creative act which rends God, that we rediscover the original identity of necessity and goodness: ‘This world, in so far as it is quite empty of God, is God himself. Necessity, in so far as it is absolutely distinct from goodness, is goodness itself.
That is why all consolation in affliction separates us from love and from truth. Therein lies the mystery of mysteries. When we touch it we are secure.’ He, therefore, who refuses to accept confusion is marked for suffering. From Antigone whom the guardian of the temporal city called upon to go and love among the shades, down to Simone Weil herself whom human injustice crucified until she was in her grave, affliction is the lot of all those lovers of the absolute who are astray in this world of relative things: ‘If we want only goodness we are opposed to the law which links good to evil as the illuminated object to the shadow, and, being opposed to the universal law of the world, it is inevitable that we should fall into affliction.’ In so far as the soul is not completely emptied of itself, this thirst for pure goodness leads to the suffering of expiation; in a perfectly innocent soul it produces redemptive suffering: ‘To be innocent is to bear the weight of the whole universe. It is to throw in the
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counterweight to restore the balance.’ Thus purity does not abolish suffering; on the contrary it deepens it to infinity whilst giving it an eternal meaning: ‘The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural cure for suffering, but a supernatural use of it.’
This mystery of suffering which ‘decreates’ man and gives him back to God finds its centre in the mystery of the Incarnation. If God had not been incarnate, man who suffers and dies would have become in a sense greater than God. But God made himself man and died on the Cross. ‘God abandoned God. God emptied himself: these words enfold the meaning both of the Creation and of the Incarnation with the Passion… . To teach us that we are nothing ( non-être) God made himself nothing.’ In other words God became a creature in order to teach us how to undo the creature in ourselves, and the act of love by which he was separated from himself brings us back to him. Simone Weil sees the essence of the mediatorial function of Jesus Christ in his assumption of the human condition with all that is most miserable and tragic in it: the signs and miracles constitute the human and relatively low part of his mission; the supernatural part consists of the agony, the sweat of blood, the Cross and his vain calls to an unanswering heaven. The words of the Redeemer: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ which sum up all the agony of the creature thrown into the midst of time and evil and to which the Father replies only with silence—these words alone are enough proof for her of the divinity of Christianity.
Man only finds salvation by living in the bare instant, renouncing the past and future. That rules out the modern myth of the indefinite progress of humanity, even when it is presented under the form of a divine education. There are few ideas which are as impious as this one, for it tends to make us seek in the future what eternity alone can give, that is to say, to turn away from God. ‘Nothing can have a destination which is not its origin. The contrary idea, the idea of progress—poison. The plant
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which bears such fruit should be torn up by the roots.’ This does not mean to say that humanity cannot acquire anything in the course of time, but such progress, in so far as it is temporal, can never be indefinite, for duration always ends by devouring what it has brought to birth. Time, accepted as irremediably different from eternity, is for us the door opening onto the eternal: we must not make of it a substitute for eternity.
From this essential condition of salvation, the necessity of living in the pure instantaneous present and of toiling regardless of results, Simone Weil draws a magnificent spirituality of manual work. Such work puts man into direct contact with the inherent absurdity and contradiction of earthly life and thus, if the worker does not lie, it enables him to touch heaven. ‘Work makes us experience in an exhausting manner the phenomenon of finality rebounding like a ball; to work in order to eat, to eat in order to work… . If we regard one of the two as an end, or the one and the other taken separately, we are lost. Only the cycle contains the truth.’ But in order to compass this cycle we must turn from the future and rise up to the eternal. ‘It is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the people.’
Here below, a thousand relative objects bearing the label of absolute come between the soul and God. So long as man does not consent to become nothing in order to be everything he needs idols. ‘Idolatry is a vital necessity in the cave.’ And among these idols the social one of the collective soul is the most powerful and dangerous. Most sins can be traced back to the social element. They spring from a thirst to appear and to dominate. It is not that Simone Weil rejects the social element as such; she knows that our environment, roots and traditions form bridges, metaxu between earth and heaven; what she repudiates is the totalitarian city—symbolized by the ‘Great Beast’ of Plato and the Beast of the Apocalypse—whose power and prestige usurp God’s place in the soul. Whether it shows itself under a conservative or a revolutionary aspect, whether it consists of
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adoring the present or the future city, social idolatry always tends to stifle and to replace the true mystic tradition. All the persecutions of prophets and saints are due to it; through it Antigone and Joan of Arc were condemned and Jesus Christ crucified. The social Beast offers man a substitute for religion which allows him to transcend his individuality without surrendering his self and so, at small cost, to dispense with God; a social imitation of the highest virtues is possible by which they are immediately degraded into pharisaism: ‘The pharisee is he who is virtuous out of obedience to the Great Beast.’
Two nations of antiquity illustrate this idolatry of the collective soul: Israel and Rome. ‘Rome is the Great Beast of atheism and materialism, adoring nothing but itself. Israel is the Great Beast of religion. Neither the one nor the other is likable. The Great Beast is always repulsive.’ The conflict between Israel and Rome, in which Nietzsche saw the duel of two irreconcilable conceptions of life, was reduced for Simone Weil to a struggle between two totalitarianisms of the same nature. It must however be emphasized that her antisemitism, which was so violent that the continuity established by the Church between the Old and New Testaments was one of the chief obstacles to her becoming a Catholic, was of a purely spiritual order and con-sequently had nothing in common with what goes by that name today. She had, for example, the same aversion for Hitlerian antisemitism as for the Jewish idea of a temporal Messianic rule.
How many times did she not speak to me of the Jewish roots of antisemitism! She was fond of saying that Hitler hunted on the same ground as the Jews and only persecuted them in order to resuscitate under another name and to his own advantage their tribal god, terrestrial, cruel and exclusive. Her horror of the social idol was of course extended to all other forms of totalitarian mysticism and in particular to Marxism. Even the Catholic Church, which moreover she admired in many of its aspects, did not escape her criticism as a social body. Its Jewish and Roman
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sources, its connexion with temporal things, its organization and hierarchy, its councils, certain formulae such as ‘no salvation outside the Church’ or anathema sit and some of its historical records such as the Inquisition, etc., appeared to her to be forms (of a higher order, but nevertheless infinitely to be feared) of social idolatry. Yet she never ceased to believe in the divine presence and inspiration within the Church. ‘Happily, the gates of hell will not prevail’, she wrote towards the end of her life; ‘there remains an incorruptible core of truth.’
Such are the main lines of Simone Weil’s thought. The sche-matic nature of this exposition necessarily leaves on one side a thousand touches which give precision, strength and balance to her doctrine. But an introduction, as its name suggests, can be no more than an invitation to cross the threshold.
I may say that my friendship and veneration for Simone Weil, the pain of losing her and the joy of finding her again each day above and beyond death, the fact that I constantly feed upon her thought and, above all, the insuperable reserve with which all true intimacy is accompanied, combine to make the effort of detachment required of me in undertaking an objective and critical analysis of her work almost impossible.
I am a Catholic, Simone Weil was not. I have never doubted for a second that she was infinitely more advanced than I am in the experimental knowledge of supernatural truths, but outwardly she always remained on the borders of the Church and was never baptized. One of the last letters she wrote me shows very clearly her attitude with regard to Catholicism: ‘At this moment I should be more ready to die for the Church, if one day before long it should need anyone to die for it, than I should be to enter it. To die does not commit one to anything, if one to say such a thing; it does not contain anything in the nature of a lie… . At present I have the impression that I am lying whatever I do, whether it be by remaining outside the Church or by
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entering it. The question is to know where there is less of a lie… .’ As to whether Simone Weil were a heroic lover of Jesus Christ, my conviction has never changed; all the same her doctrine, though it is within the orbit of the great Christian truths, contains nothing specifically Catholic and she never accepted the universal authority of the Church. Now a Catholic who has to assess the thought of a non-Catholic has difficulty in avoiding two opposite extremes. The first consists of applying the principles of speculative theology to the thought in question and mercilessly condemning everything which, seen from outside, does not appear to be strictly orthodox. This method has the advantage of railings, which are always necessary on the bridges leading to God, but, used without understanding or love, it is in danger of degenerating into an abuse of the evangelical precept: ‘if thine eye offend thee …’. For my part, as I am neither a theologian nor specially entrusted with the defence of the deposit of Christian faith, I do not feel myself in any way quali-fied for such an undertaking. The last thing I want to do is to set myself up as an official theologian who, armed with a sort of Baedeker of divine things, presumes to pronounce final judgment on the report, even incomplete, of a heroic explorer… .
The second danger consists of trying at whatever cost to bend the thought one is studying into conformity with Catholic truth.
That is a manifest abuse of the text ‘compel them to come in’.
We think that whatever is true or pure in a human life or work finds its place naturally in the Catholic synthesis without being forced or twisted in order to do so. We have no need to grasp everything for ourselves like a miser trying to increase his treasure, for everything already belongs to us who belong to Christ.
It is not for me to decide how far the ideas of Simone Weil are or are not orthodox. I will confine myself to showing—on purely personal evidence—how far a Christian can interpret these ideas in order to find nourishment for his spiritual life.
I shall be particularly careful not to pick a quarrel with
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Simone Weil about words. Her vocabulary is that of the mystics and not of the speculative theologians: it does not seek to express the eternal order of being but the actual journey of the soul in search of God. This is the case with all spiritual writers. When in the Dialogue of Saint Catherine of Siena Christ says to her; ‘I am that which is, thou art that which is not’, this formula which reduces the creature to pure nothingness cannot be accepted on the plane of ontological knowledge. It is the same with the expressions used by so many mystics who speak of the poverty of God, of his dependence in relation to the creature, etc.: they are true in the order of love and false in the order of being.
Jacques Maritain was the first to show, with perfect metaphysical precision, that these two vocabularies do not contradict each other, for one is related to speculative and the other to practical and affective knowledge.
Two things in particular in Simone Weil’s work have shocked the few friends to whom I have shown her manuscripts. First the absolute division which she seems to establish between the created world and a transcendent God who has tied his own hands in the presence of evil and who abandons the universe to the sport of chance and absurdity: there is a danger lest this clean cut should lead to the elimination of the idea of Providence in history and of the notion of progress, and as a result to a misunderstanding of the values and duties of this present world. In the second place her fear of the social element is likely to lead to the isolation of the individual in a proud self-sufficiency.
I repeat that Simone Weil speaks as a mystic and not as a metaphysician. I am prepared to admit, and I do so readily, that the tendency of her genius which inclines her constantly to stress the irreducible nature of supernatural reality often leads her to overlook the meeting places and transitional stages between nature and grace. Nothing is more certain than that she has misunderstood certain aspects of Christian piety. But that does not authorize us to assert that the aspect she describes is not
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Christian. No human experience—if we except that of Christ—has ever embraced supernatural truth in its totality. Saint John of the Cross, for instance, does not emphasize the same divine realities as Saint Bonaventura. There are several schools of spirituality, and, if we substitute the word ‘God’ for ‘world’, we can say of the mystics what the poet said of men in general: ‘Dass jeder sieht die Welt in seinem Sinn
Und jeder siehet recht, so viel ist Sinn darin!’
If, as the Gospel says, there are many mansions in heaven, there are also many roads which lead to heaven.
Simone Weil chose the negative road: ‘There are people for whom everything is salutary here below which brings God nearer; for me it is everything which keeps him at a distance.’ Is not this royal road of salvation which consists of finding and loving God in what is absolutely other than God (the blind necessity of nothingness and evil …) strangely like the bare mountain of Carmel where man has as his guide just one single word: nothing? And does Saint John of the Cross speak in less absolute terms of the nothingness of created things and of the love which binds us to them?—‘The entire being of the creatures compared with the infinite being of God is nothing, and thus the soul which is a prisoner of what is created is nothing.
All the beauty of creatures is supreme ugliness before the infinite beauty of God. All the grace, all the charm of creatures is insipid and repulsive before the divine beauty. All the goodness the creatures contain is only the height of malice when it is in the presence of divine goodness. Only God is good… .’
Moreover, though the ‘theology’ of Simone Weil rejects the idea of popular imagination of a God who governs the world like the father of a family or a temporal sovereign, it does not in any way exclude the action of Providence in the higher sense of the word. There is no doubt that here below matter and evil
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exercise ‘all the causality which belongs to them’; the spectacle of the innumerable horrors of history is enough to prove that the kingdom of God is not of this world (does not Scripture describe the devil as the prince of this world?). Nevertheless God remains mysteriously present in creation: without in any way changing the calamities which weigh upon us, his grace plays upon the laws of gravity like the sun’s rays in the clouds. This God ‘who is silent in his love’ is not indifferent to human misery after the manner of the God of Aristotle or Spinoza. It is out of love for his creature that he appears to efface himself from creation; it is in order to lead him on to the supreme purity that he leaves him to cross the whole expanse of suffering and darkness abandoned and alone. In tying his own hands in the presence of evil, in stripping himself of everything which resembles earthly power and prestige, God invites men to love nothing but love in him.
‘He gives himself to men either as powerful or as perfect—it is for them to choose.’ But here below infinite perfection is infinite weakness: God, in so far as he is love, hangs wholly and entirely on the Cross… .
Simone Weil is not in any way mistaken about the dignity and necessity of temporal values. She sees them as intermediaries—metaxu—between the soul and God. ‘What is it a sacrilege to destroy? Not that which is base, for that is of no importance. Not that which is high, for we cannot touch that. The metaxu. The metaxu form the region of good and evil… . No human being should be deprived of these metaxu, that is to say, of those relative and mixed good things (home, country, traditions, culture, etc.) which warm and nourish the soul and without which, short of sainthood, a human life is not possible.’ But these relative and mixed good things can only be treated as such by those who, out of love for God, have passed through the total stripping; all others make them more or less into idols: ‘Only he who loves God with a supernatural love can see means simply as means.’
Whatever she may have said about ‘choice, a notion of a low
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level’ and about the absolute fruitlessness of voluntary action in the spiritual domain, Simone Weil does not for all that fall into quietism. On the contrary she constantly recalls that without strict diligence in our practice of the natural virtues, mystical life can be nothing but an illusion. The cause of grace dwells outside man, but its condition is within him. Simone Weil’s hatred for illusion, above all when it takes the form of sensible devotion and a kind of religious Schwärmerei, counterbalances everything which in so purified a spirituality might flatter the imagination or the pride. She liked to repeat, after Saint John of the Cross, that inspiration which leads us to neglect the accomplishment of simple and lowly obligations does not come from God. ‘Duty is given us in order to kill the self… . We only attain to real prayer after we have worn down our own will by keeping rules.’
She regarded with such suspicion any religious exaltation unsupported by a strict fidelity to the daily task that the infrequent negligences of which, largely as a result of her delicate health, she was guilty in the accomplishment of her duties caused her to have bitter doubts about the truth of her spiritual vocation. ‘All these mystical phenomena’, she wrote at the end of her life with heartrending humility, ‘are absolutely beyond me. I do not understand them. They are meant for beings who, to start with, possess the elementary moral virtues. I speak of them at random. And I am not even capable of telling myself sincerely that I speak of them at random.’
Fully sharing the political ideas of Simone Weil as I do, I think it more becoming that I should not dwell on them at great length. Any other person but myself might make something very moving out of the story of this life in which, through the influence of reflection and faith, an essentially revolutionary temperament was gradually impregnated with the cult of tradition and the past. For Simone Weil never ceased to be a revolutionary.
She was not however pledged to a chimerical future leading men away from reality, but devoted herself more and more to revolu-i n t r o d u c t i o n xxxvii
tion in the name of an unchanging and eternal principle—a principle which has to be constantly re-established because it constantly tends to be degraded by time. Simone Weil did not believe in an indefinite perfecting of humanity: she even thought that the unfolding of history gave proof of the law of entropy rather than that of unlimited progress after the style of Condorcet. There is no need to defend her on this point. I do not see how it can be heretical to hold (in conformity with the great Greek tradition) that ‘change cannot be anything but limited and cyclic’. As for her invectives against the ‘social Beast’, however excessive a form they may sometimes take we only have to put them back into their context in order to be assured that they do not in any way constitute an apology for anarchy. ‘The social order’, she writes, ‘is irreducibly that of the prince of this world. Our only duty with regard to the social is to try to limit the evil of it… . Something of the social labelled divine; an intoxicating mixture which brings about every sort of licence—the devil disguised.’ But she adds immediately: ‘And yet what about a city? But that is not of the social order—it is a human environment of which we are no more conscious than of the air we breathe—a contact with nature, the past, tradition. A man’s roots are not of the social order.’ In other words, social influence is both food and poison. It is food in so far as it provides the individual with the inner equipment necessary for living as a man and for approaching God; poison in so far as it tends to rob him of his liberty and to take God’s place. The perpetual encroachments of the social order upon the divine—that incessant degradation of mystical conceptions into politics—afford strong enough evidence, today more than ever, of the seriousness of this last danger.
Mutatis mutandis, the same remarks are applicable to the Church.
Obviously a spirit so hungering for the absolute as was that of Simone Weil would necessarily be somewhat lacking in a sense
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of historical relativity: the text nolite conformari huic a seculo 1 was for her a commandment allowing of no reservations. She found it very hard to understand that certain concessions of the Church to temporal exigencies did not in any way involve its eternal soul: the beatification of Charlemagne, for instance, seemed to her a scandalous compromise with the social idol. Somewhere she speaks of the Church as ‘a great totalitarian beast’. What does that signify? Totalitarianism is characterized at the same time by a refusal of the All and by the claim to be all. As the Catholic Church is the messenger of the All here below it does not need to be totalitarian. The accusation made by Simone Weil, in so far as it is well founded, can therefore only be applicable to certain members of the body of the Church who arbitrarily bolt the doors of love and truth, thus failing to understand the universal vocation of Catholicism. There is no question of reopening here—especially at a time when so many Catholics do not hesitate to provide whips with which to beat their Master—the discussions formerly caused by the idea of ‘the Church as a body marked by sin’. We will only state that when Christ said that ‘the gates of hell should not prevail’, he did not promise that everything in the Church would remain eternally pure, but that the essential deposit of faith would be saved come what might. The Church is rooted in God: that does not exclude the possibility that the tree may bear dried-up or worm-eaten branches. To have faith is to believe that the divine sap will never fail. The preservation of this ‘incorruptible core of truth’, to use the actual expression of Simone Weil, in the midst of all the impurities mixed into the body of the Church, constitutes moreover one of the strongest proofs of the divinity of Catholicism. The Church could only become a ‘great totalitarian beast’ in so far as its human body were totally separated from its divine soul. This is an impossible hypothesis, for the gates of hell shall never 1 ‘Be not conformed to this world.’
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prevail… . Today it is seen as the last refuge of the universal faced with rampant totalitarianisms.
Thus with Simone Weil the expulsion of the social idol does not lead to religious individualism. ‘The self and the social are the two great idols.’ Grace saves from the one as from the other.
That is doubtless what Célestin Bouglé was trying to express in his own manner when he saw in Simone Weil while she was still a student ‘a mixture of anarchist and cleric …’.
Simone Weil can only be understood on the level from which she speaks. Her work is addressed to souls who, if they are not stripped as naked as her own, have at least kept deep within them an aspiration for that pure goodness to which she devoted her life and her death. I am not unaware of the dangers of a spirituality such as hers. The worst forms of giddiness are caused by the highest summits. But the fact that light may burn us is not a valid reason for leaving it under a bushel.
It is not a question of philosophy here but of life. Far from claiming to set up a personal system, Simone Weil strove with all her power to keep herself out of her work. Her one wish was to avoid getting in the way between God and men—to disappear ‘so that the Creator and the creature could exchange their secrets’. She cared nothing for her genius, knowing only too well that true greatness consists in learning to be nothing. ‘What does it matter what energy or gifts there may be in me? I have always enough to disappear… .’ She had her way: some of her texts attain to that impersonal resonance which is the sign of the highest inspiration: ‘It is impossible to forgive whoever does us harm if this harm lowers us. We have to think that it does not lower us but that it shows our true level.’ Or again: ‘If someone does me harm I must want this harm not to degrade me—this out of love for him who inflicted it upon me and so that he shall not really have done harm.’ It is in such ejaculations of humility and love rather than on the systematic side of her work that
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Simone Weil appears as a pure messenger. I have never ceased to believe in her. In publishing the following pages I extend this confidence to all the souls who shall come to her.
All the writings contained in this book have been taken from the manuscripts which Simone Weil confided to me personally.
They were therefore all written before May 1942. More recent work, which her parents have been kind enough to show me, has not been included here. I have myself chosen the extracts from the notebooks, in which they were interspersed with innumerable quotations as well as philological and scientific studies. I hesitated between two ways of presentation: either to give the thoughts of Simone Weil one after the other in the order of their composition, or to classify them. The second method seemed preferable. I am anxious to express my thanks to all who have helped and encouraged me in this work: the Reverend Father Perrin, Lanza del Vasto, M. and Mme Honnorat (who were personal friends of Simone Weil), Gabriel Marcel and Jean de Fabrèques. In the checking and transcription of the texts M. V.-H. Debidour, who kindly helped to translate the Greek quotations incorporated in the aphorisms, and my devoted colleague Mlle Odile Keller have both given an infinite amount of valuable help.
G T
F 1947