WHEN the émigrée French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil (1909-43) died, aged 34, of tuberculosis, she was buried in between the Jewish and Roman Catholic sections of the New Cemetery in Ashford, Kent. Weil’s faith, no less than her philosophy, has evaded neat categorisation by writers ever since. Yet, in this new Oxford Very Short Introduction, Rebecca Rozelle-Stone does sterling work in making this enigmatic but compelling figure intelligible.
Weil was born into a secular-Jewish Parisian family, and her formative milieu might best be described as one of sympathetic agnosticism. As a young woman, she had a series of unlooked-for mystical experiences while visiting Catholic churches. These fostered a deep attraction to Christianity (and identification with its ascetic tradition), which was, however, never consummated in baptism.
Weil’s reticence about conversion had less to do with attachment to her Jewish roots, with which she enjoyed a complex relationship, and more to do with her deep philosophical distrust of power, authority, and ideology. That hermeneutic of suspicion is a key theme also of her political writing.
Indeed, Weil’s eschewing of the final step in joining the Church, Rozelle-Stone argues, mirrored her refusal to take up membership of any established political party — though she did serve briefly (and disastrously) as a volunteer in an anarchist brigade during the Spanish Civil War.
In a letter to her Dominican friend Fr Joseph-Marie Perrin, Weil explained that her refusal had to be read against the background of the clash of totalising ideologies then threatening to destroy Europe.
“Social enthusiasms today have such power, they raise people so effectively to the supreme degree of heroism in suffering and death, that I think it is as well that a few sheep should remain outside the fold in order to bear witness that the love of Christ is essentially something different”.
As a theorist, Weil offered a radical critique of both the atomisation of liberal modernity and the homogenising tendencies of communist and fascist systems. She sought an “intermediate term” between them, centred on the realisation of inter-personal community. Her work thus offers a powerful and implicitly correlative articulation of what Christians call “Trinitarian politics”.
Many people inside the Church would benefit from reading this exemplary person of good will who remained outside it.
The Revd Alexander Faludy is a freelance journalist based in Budapest.
Simone Weil: A very short introduction
Rebecca Rozelle-Stone
OUP £8.99
(978-0-19-284696-9)
Church Times Bookshop £8.09