THE French writer Simone Weil (1909-43), from an assimilated Jewish background, was a philosopher, political activist, and Christian mystic, who had been rigorously trained at the École Normale Supérieure, in Paris. Throughout her life, she wrote philosophical texts that are still read today. Unusually for a philosopher, she translated her thoughts into action, becoming a political activist — at first, close to a tiny Marxist splinter group, and once, famously, hiding Trotsky in her parents’ flat.
To understand the life of working people, she spent a year as a machinist in a factory. Later, she fought in the Spanish Civil War, and, finally, joined de Gaulle’s Free French in London. Although an agnostic, at Easter 1938, she visited Solesmes monastery. During that visit, she was introduced by an Oxford undergraduate to the metaphysical poets. Shortly afterwards, to her complete amazement, she began to have mystical experiences of union with Christ.
The first of these occurred while she was slowly reading George Herbert’s poem “Love III”. Thereafter, she identified as a Christian, but, unhappy with the Roman Catholic Church’s dogmatism, she refused baptism until she was on her deathbed.
Unknown and virtually unpublished before her death in 1943, in Ashford, Kent, her many writings have since then gradually appeared in print. Albert Camus was an early admirer. Her writings appeal to a wide variety of people. For example, in 2023 Professor Jacqueline Rose, a literary critic for the London Review of Books published The Plague, a set of essays written after Covid-19, inspired by Weil. Last year, the philosopher Dr Stuart Jesson gave a series of talks on Weil’s philosophy at the London Jesuit Centre. Whereas Rose, looking through a Freudian lens, celebrates Weil as an anti-colonial political philosopher, Dr Jesson sees in Weil a systematic philosopher and Christian mystic.
FOR many people, the most striking element of Weil’s writings is her description of suffering and what she calls “affliction” (le malheur). Suffering is the lot of all human beings, but we can endure it with relative ease, especially if we experience it as a result of fulfilling what we see as our mission in life. Affliction is qualitatively more severe: it is what crushes the soul, not only in its physical impact, but also in its emotional and social aspects.
The following is an example. I once met a soldier from the DRC, who had been fighting for one side in a civil war. He was captured and tortured by the other side. That is suffering. Then he was recaptured by his own side, and tortured again. He told me that being tortured by his own side was more painful. Being tortured by the opposing side is suffering. Being tortured by our own side is affliction, because it is not only physically painful, but also threatens our sense of meaning, and of belonging to our social group.
This was the fate of Jesus, handed over to the occupying power by his own people for humiliation, torture, and a barbaric execution. This was deeply threatening to his identity as the Son of God and as a Jew. For Weil, affliction makes it very difficult to feel loved by God and to feel love for oneself.
Weil’s experience of affliction was gained during her year as an unqualified machinist in factories near Paris, where she was the lowest of the low. As well as hunger and tiredness, she must have experienced endless ribbing of a highly sexist kind. When she came home in the evenings, she was too tired to think. Once you have experienced affliction, she wrote, it never leaves you. It can render you mute. But it can force you back on the love of God in a way that you have never experienced before. And it can open you to hear the muted cry of another person who has also experienced affliction. For these reasons, you can accept it — and even be grateful for it.
WHY do people still read Weil today? She believed that she had remained outside the formal boundaries of the Christian Church so that she could bring others, non-Christians like herself, to Christ. At the very least, her life would prove to Christians — and to French Roman Catholics in particular — that the Spirit could be active outside the formal boundaries of the Church.
For me, it is her definition of affliction which strikes the most powerful chord. If we were looking for affliction in England today, we might start with the survivors of child sexual abuse. But, as Weil wrote, the experience of affliction is ultimately subjective. Could some have experienced being sent away to boarding school at a young age as affliction? If so, that might at least partly explain the attraction of her work to a generation of English people.
In a time when all the Churches are struggling with the question how to respond to the survivors of child sexual abuse in the Church, might Weil have something to teach us? Jean-Marc Sauvé, a retired senior civil servant, was the president of the independent commission tasked by the French Roman Catholic Church with investigating historic child sexual abuse in that Church (CIASE). Over two years, he met hundreds of the survivors. Listening to their pain, day after day, he found that “the pain of others had entered into [him] and into [his] flesh” (the interview is available here; the full report is here).
In Weil’s language, he had listened to their affliction with such deep empathy, and without flinching from it, that their affliction had entered into him. Moreover, even after the report was completed, he found that his pain and affliction did not disappear, but remained so severe that he needed psychological treatment. He did not regret this, because, he wrote, through his voice, the voiceless could at last be heard.
Dr Gervase Vernon is a retired GP and former medical report writer for Freedom from Torture. freedomfromtorture.org