SIMONE WEIL An Apprenticeship in Attention Mario von der Ruhr XN continuumContinuum The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane Il York Road Suite 704 London New York SEI 7NX NY 10038 warwcontinuumbooks.com € 2006 Mario von der Ruhr All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission from the publishers. First published 2006 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 8264 5823 8 (hardback) ISBN 0 8264 7462 4 (paperback) Typeset by YHT Ltd, London Printed and bound by Ashford Colour Press Ltd., Gosport, Hants.For my mother and SarahContents Acknowledgements ix Abbreviations xi Introduction 1 1. Simone Weil’s Life 4 A. Childhood, adolescence, and university education (1909-1932) 4 B. Teaching and revolutionary years (1932-1938) 9 C. Religious phase (1938-1943) 13 2. An Apprenticeship in Attention 19 A. Prelude 19 B. The pursuit of truth 20 C. Attention and school studies 25 D. Attention, inattention, and our neighbour 30 3. A Philosophical Apprenticeship 38 A. From mathematics to philosophy 38 B. The influence of Alain 49 4. Politics and the Needs of the Soul: Factory Work 60 5. Religious Reflection (1): God, the Christian Inspiration, and the Incarnation 3 6. Religious Reflection (2): Christ, Krishna, and the Old Testament 100 7. Religious Reflection (3): Creation, Affliction, and Last Things 120 Notes 142 Bibliography . 158 Explanatory Notes on the Publication of Weil’s Work 163 Index 165Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Simone Weil reading group at Lampeter, especially David Cockburn, John Daniel, and Ilham Dilman, for many stimulating discussions of Weil’s work, as well as Howard Mounce, D. Z. Phillips, Ieuan Lloyd, Marius Felderhof and John Kinsey for drawing my attention to aspects of Weil’s thought that would otherwise have eluded me. lam also grateful to Andrew Walby for seeing the book through the final stages of production, and indeed to Timothy Bartel for his superb work as copy-editor. My greatest debt, however, is to the Editor of this monograph series, Brian Davies, without whose infinite patience and invaluable critical comments the manuscript would not have found its way into print. Its shortcomings are, of course, entirely my own. Lastly, I gratefully acknowledge Kunjana Thomas’s permission to reprint ‘The Island’ and ‘Absence’ from R. S. Thomas’s Later Poems 1972-1982 (London: Papermac, 1984), and Orion Books’ permission to quote the last stanza of ‘Apostrophe’, from R. S. Thomas’s Collected Poems 1945-1990 (London: Phoenix, 2004). Mario von der Ruhr Swansea June 2006Abbreviations Cahiers La Connaissance surnaturelle Cahiers Simone Weil Ecrits de Londres et derniéres lettres First and Last Notebooks Formative Writings 1929-1941 Gravity and Grace Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks Lectures on Philosophy Letter to a Priest Notebooks The Need for Roots Guvres completes oc! Oc IL1 OC IL.2 OC IL3 OC VI.1 OC VI.2 OC VI.3 Premiers écrits philosophiques Ecrits historiques et politiques: L’Engagement syndical (1927-juillet 1934) Ecrits historiques et politiques: L'’Expérience ouvriére et l’'adieu a la révolution (juillet 1934-juin 1937) Ecrits historiques et politiques: Vers la guerre (1937-1940) Cahiers (1933-septembre 1941) Cahiers (septembre 1941-février 1942) Cahiers (février 1942-juin 1942) Oppression and Liberty Pensées sans ordre concernant l'amour de Dieu Selected Essays La Source grecque Seventy LettersSN SWR sSww SIMONE WEIL On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God Simone Weil Reader Simone Weil: Writings Waiting for God xii eeIntroduction Simone Weil was described by André Gide as ‘the best spiritual writer of this century’, by the existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel as a ‘witness to the absolute’, and by T. S. Eliot as ‘a kind of genius akin to that possessed by the saints’. Her work impressed Albert Camus no less than Flannery O’Connor, Iris Murdoch, Julien Green, Alberto Moravia, and Thomas Merton; and even Pope John XXIII, when still a papal nuncio in Paris, was so taken with it that he wrote to tell her parents. In spite of these accolades, however, many readers are likely to regard Weil’s liberal-humanist upbringing and firm resolution to stay outside the Church, her refusal to be baptised, her sympathies for Marxist and socialist ideals, and her unorthodox attitude towards such issues as the Incarnation, the nature of the mir- aculous, and the hope for immortality, as poor credentials for the title of ‘outstanding Christian thinker’, and they are inclined to contrast her work unfavourably with that of Anselm, Augustine, and St Paul on the one hand, and Niebuhr, Bultmann, Rahner, or Barth, on the other. The purpose of this monograph is to show that the categorisation of Weil as, at best, an ‘honorary’ Christian is seriously mistaken, and that an introductory volume on her thought is to be welcomed for the reflection it invites on the nature of a Christian life, for what Weil has to say about Christianity at its deepest, for the light she sheds on the relation between religious belief and atheism, and for the cautiously ecumenical spirit in which she approaches not only the various manifestations of Christianity, but other religious faiths. A further reason for welcoming the inclusion of Simone Weil in the present series is that, of the volumes published in it so far, only three — on Teresa of Avila, Catherine of Siena, and Edith Stein — are 1SIMONE WEIL on female Christian thinkers, and that Simone Weil would make a worthy addition. While the author’s own interest in Simone Weil’s work is pri- marily philosophical, an introductory monograph on the philoso- phical issues in her ceuvre would be both unnecessary and unduly restrictive. Quite apart from the fact that these issues — in the phi- losophy of language, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of science — have been extensively discussed elsewhere (e.g. by Peter Winch, Rush Rhees, D. Z. Phillips, Eric Springsted, Richard Bell and others), such a narrow treatment would hardly do justice to the breadth of Weil's concerns, which are not merely philosophical but literary, historical, political, and religious. For this reason, the present volume is directed at general readers who have little or no previous knowledge of the subject, although the author would also expect the discussion to be helpful to academic readers with a background in philosophy, theology, history, political theory, or educational science. Structurally, the various chapters should be seen as elaborations on the material presented in the biographical sketch (Chapter 1). Whether one thinks of Simone Weil as a teacher, manual labourer, political activist, or religious believer, thought and action are always closely interconnected for her. The purpose of the subsequent chapters is not only to make this connection more transparent, but to show how Weil’s reflections throw a distinctive light on the meaning of such things as education, manual labour, political activity, and religious worship. The order in which these issues are taken up follows roughly the chronology of Weil’s life and its the- matic division into (a) her own education and pursuit of truth in the spirit of love (1909-32), (b) a phase of predominantly political reflection (1932-38), and (c) a phase of intense religious reflection (1938-43). In all this, Weil's rich conceptual tapestry is held together by a common thread, identified in Chapter 2 as the notion of iattente (attention), with important implications for philosophical reflection, moral deliberation, political activity, and religious belief. These implications are developed in Chapters 3, 4 and 5-7, respec- tively, and should enable the reader to see, not only how Weil’s thinking is crystallised in this central idea of attention, but why the concluding lines of Welsh poet R. S. Thomas's ‘Apostrophe’ could serve as a fine and poignant expression of Weil’s spiritual labours:eee ee eee ee INTRODUCTION There are no journeys, I tell them. Love turns on its own axis, as do beauty and truth, and the wise are they who in every generation remain still to assess their nearness to it by the magnitude of their shadow.' Weil’s writings reveal what such stillness and spiritual self- assessment may come to. If her life nevertheless ended on a mel- ancholy note, it was partly because she found the shadow cast by her own endeavours to be still so desperately far from Beauty and Truth, and partly because she was pained at the recognition that much of what she had to say would either not be heard at all, or else misunderstood. This introduction to her thought is intended as a small contribution to disseminating her reflections and forestalling their misinterpretation.1 Simone Weil’s Life A. Childhood, adolescence, and university education (1909-1932) Simone Weil was born in Paris on 3 February, 1909, the second child of Bernard Weil and Selma Reinherz. Descended from a long line of businessmen, Bernard was the only intellectual on his side of the family tree, and soon developed a vocation to become a doctor. His attitude towards religion oscillated between agnosticism and atheism, but he was a kind, unassuming, and tolerant man, and greatly respected his own mother’s deep devotion to the Jewish faith. Simone’s mother Selma came from a family of Galician Jews, and was born in Russia. Her parents, too, were in the trade busi- ness, but in addition had a strongly artistic vein, with her father composing poetry in Hebrew, and her mother developing into a highly talented pianist. Unlike Bernard’s parents, however, they were not practising Jews. Simone thus grew up in a family that already exhibited a broad spectrum of attitudes towards religious belief, though she herself was neither raised in the Jewish faith, nor aware of the distinction between Jews and Gentiles until she was ten years old. The accounts we have of the Weil household reveal a highly cultured family, who had little regard for material wealth or even comfort. On the contrary, Selma ensured that her children had a Spartan upbringing, and placed much emphasis on outdoor sports eeeSIMONE WEIL’S LIFE activities, including hiking, cycling, rugby, dance, and gymnastics. Simone pushed herself to the limit to perform well in these, even though her physical constitution was frail, and much more prone to illness than that of her older brother André. Plagued by chronic ailments from an early age, she nevertheless bore her suffering with Stoic resilience and an astounding degree of self-effacement — dispositions that no doubt informed her intellectual precociousness and her concern for the welfare of others as well. When barely four years old, she already impressed doctors at a Parisian hospital with her wide-ranging vocabulary, and soon began to recite Cyrano de Bergerac, Corneille, Racine, even mathematical formulae, to her brother André, who also taught her to read the newspaper at six. At the age of ten, she was reading English children’s books and even wrote her own fairytale, ‘The Fire Sylphs’, which was published posthumously in Le Figaro Littéraire in 1962. Unlike other girls her age, Simone never played with dolls, could not be persuaded to take up needle and thread for sewing, and was wholly indifferent to jewellery: ‘I do not like luxury’, the barely three-year-old told her cousin on being presented with an expensive ring, and this attitude towards worldly goods would stay with her for the rest of her life. Far more important, in her view, was the plight of the poor and afflicted, for whose relief she was already going well beyond the call of duty: when the war broke out in 1914, for example, she made a point of giving up all her sugar and cho- colate, so that these could be sent to needy soldiers on the front. Simone’s relation to her brother André, who would later become one of the leading mathematicians of his age, was one of great spiritual kinship. Completely inseparable, they formed ‘a magical and informative solidarity’, or, as André himself put it, ‘two instruments tuned to the same note’,'’ sharing with each other everything they learnt and joining in common childhood pranks, such as knocking on the doors of strangers and shouting, ‘We are dying of hunger; our mama and papa are letting us die of hunger,” reaping generous donations of sweets and biscuits as a result.? And while they also fought with each other, a quarrel was always seen as ‘a sort of magical duel of honour’ ? that would leave their friendship completely intact. Simone could not help copying her brother in everything he did, even playing soccer, but it was his preoccupation with mathematics, geometry and classical science from which she gained the most for her intellectual development. Simone’s childhood was undoubtedly a happy one, but it was also marked by a certain restlessness and instability. When the war 5SIMONE WEIL broke out in 1914, her father was called up and, due to his fre- quently changing medical assignments, had to embark on an odyssey that took his family from Paris to Neufchateau, Menton, Mayennes, Chartres, and Laval, and finally back to Paris. As a consequence, the children’s education was constantly interrupted and needed to be supplemented with private tuition at home. Jacques Cabaud notes that the young Simone was ‘not a demonstrably affectionate child’,‘ that she avoided physical contact and felt uncomfortable embracing or kissing even those whom she knew well. One reason for this aversion to physical contact had to do with the family’s phobia toward germs and the hair-raising stories told by the bacteriologist Elie Metchnikoff, a friend of the Weils and a frequent guest at their home. On one occasion, as he kissed Simone’s hand, she burst into tears and ran away, screaming for water. The history of these reactions probably began with the acute appendicitis that troubled her when she was still young. Anxious to protect her daughter from microbes, Selma Weil was adamant that her children always wash their hands and open doors with their elbows, and never kiss anyone. Another reason for Simone’s lasting shyness and reserve, espe- cially towards men, may have been that her mother never encour- aged her to accentuate her femininity in the ways that women do, but instead preferred to call Simone ‘our son number two’ and ‘Simon’, and deliberately tried to do ‘fher] best to encourage in Simone not the simpering graces of a little girl but the forth- rightness of a boy, even if this must at times seem rude’, thereby reinforcing Simone’s own feeling that, given her conception of life and what it was going to demand of her, it would have been better if she had been born as a man.’ This does not mean, however, that she was never drawn towards a serious love relationship. As she explained to a pupil in a letter of 1935: ‘I can tell you that when, at your age, and later on too, I was tempted to try to get to know love, I decided not to — telling myself that it was better not to commit my life in a direction impossible to foresee until I was sufficiently mature to know what, in a general way, I wish from life and what I expect from it.’ It was only when she became clear about what she expected from life that she decided to live a life of celibacy. From 1919 onwards, Simone at last enjoyed a more regular education at the Lycée Fénelon, a junior college for girls, where she already displayed a gift for mathematics and, even more unusually, a serious interest in politics. Indeed, as Jacques Cabaud has plau- sibly observed, the foundations for Simone’s engagement with 6SIMONE WEIL’S LIFE revolutionary politics were probably laid at this time,’ when the ten- year-old condemned the Treaty of Versailles for being grossly unfair to the enemy. At the age of twelve, Simone first experienced the violent and chronic headaches that were to plague her for the rest of her life. These episodes were not only painful in themselves, but made it difficult for her to eat, as chewing food only aggravated the pain and tended to induce nausea. Matters got even worse when, at fourteen, she fell into a depression so severe that she seriously considered taking her life. This adolescent crisis was fuelled by a sense of intellectual inadequacy vis-d-vis her brother’s mathematical genius and the conviction that her mediocre abilities would never enable her to acquire more than a superficial understanding of the nature and purpose of human existence. Fortunately, Simone not only recovered, but continued to flourish in her education. Thanks to her mother’s concern for her intellectual development, she had already enjoyed a privileged upbringing and was even transferred to different sections of the same school, so that she could take advantage, for example, of Charles-Brun’s Greek class, or of the Romance philologist Bédier’s lectures on Plato’s Crito and Phaedo.* In 1924, she was admitted to the baccalaureate in Classics, at the Lycée Victor Duruy. Unsure, at first, whether to specialise in phi- losophy or mathematics, she eventually settled on the former, though she never lost her interest in the latter. Simone’s biographers describe her as an absent-minded student, who would keep ink bottles in her pocket and walk around with ink-stained clothes. Her fellow-students apparently found her intimidating, while she, in turn, tended to withdraw into herself and talk little. One of her teachers at Duruy was the well-known philosopher René Le Senne (1882-1954), who also had special interests in psychology and character analysis, and who confirmed that she was one of the best students he had encountered throughout his career. A year later, in 1925, Weil attained her baccalaureate in philo- sophy, which finally allowed her to transfer to Lycée Henri IV, in preparation for the university entrance examination. Her aim was to be admitted to the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure, where only the most gifted were granted a state scholarship, in return for which they had to accept a ten-year teaching contract at one of the country’s numerous /ycées. Henri IV had only just opened its doors to women, and Weil was one of only three women in a class of 30, 7SIMONE WEIL showing herself from the first to be an outstandingly good student — serious, original, and independent. At Henri IV, she was predominantly tutored by the philosopher Emile Chartier (1868-1951), also known as ‘Alain’, or, as his stu- dents preferred to call him, ‘The Man’. Alain’s influence on Weil was considerable. Cabaud describes him as ‘a quasi-spiritual source of inspiration’,? and Fiori as ‘the sole polarizing model of her education, the Socrates of her thought and style’.'° Alain, who was descended from farmers in Normandy and had ‘the swagger of a musketeer’,"" not only introduced Weil to the work of his own teacher, Jules Lagneau (1851-1894), a perceptive commentator on the philosophy of Kant, but impressed her with his militant political activism and uncompromising rejection of anything that threatened critical and independent thinking. Passionately concerned to culti- vate his students’ intellects, Alain made a point of giving them a thorough background in the history of philosophy, with special emphasis on Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, and Kant, as well as an appreciation of the great works of literature, including the works of Homer, the Greek tragedians (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides), Marcus Aurelius, Voltaire, and Balzac. It was in Alain’s class, too, that Weil acquired her disciplined approach to writing and learned to spend at least two hours a day committing her thoughts to paper. During her time at Henri IV she also began to take an interest in trade unionism.’ Impressively, Weil took her university entrance examinations along with Simone de Beauvoir and came first, both women topping a list of thirty men. She was admitted to the Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1928. Because of her interest in politics, many of her comrades thought her both a Communist and fervently anti- religious, were irritated by her appearance and monotonous voice, and generally found her awkward to be around. Meanwhile, Weil was struggling to overcome her physical frailty and joined a rugby team, but the venture proved to be a disappointment. Although she was now at the Ecole Normale, she nevertheless continued to attend Alain’s classes at Henri IV. He himself was in no doubt that Weil was a first-rate thinker, and so decided to publish her philosophical reflections in Libres propos, including a paper on perception (20 May 1929) and one on time (20 August 1929). Alongside her phi- losophical research, Weil continued to be involved in political causes, drafted anti-militarist petitions, supported the League for the Rights of Man, opposed French and other kinds of colonialism, propagated a revolutionary transformation of society through non-ne SIMONE WEIL’S LIFE violent means, and found herself gravitating ever closer to Marx- ism, as a result of which her detractors began to speak of her as ‘The Red Virgin’. But Weil did not conform to the image of the stereotypical left- wing intellectual. Instead of merely theorising about manual labour, she came to experience working-class life at first hand, by digging potatoes or regularly helping with harvests during the holidays. Moreover, since 1927 she had also been involved in adult education classes for rail workers, set up by Alain’s friend Lucien Cancouét. The aptly called Groupe d’Education Sociale taught French, Sociology, Political Economy, and Mathematics to a group of 25 to 30 workers, with Weil’s brother André contributing the mathe- matics lessons. In the summer of 1931, Weil passed her final examinations and received the cherished agrégation. Her preference was to be posted to an industrial town in northern or central France, but her request was denied and so, in September 1931, she ended up in Le-Puy-en-Vélay, a small town in the south of France, some 300 miles from Paris. B. Teaching and revolutionary years (1932-1938) While in Le Puy, Weil’s involvement in political activities continued unabated. In her spare time, she would regularly travel to St- Etienne for exchanges with the assistant secretary of the Loire branch of the syndicalist (trade union) movement, Albertine Thé- venon, with whom she explored the question of how the unions could possibly improve the workers’ plight if their understanding of it was itself deficient or incomplete. As Weil would later observe in an article written for L’Effort: ‘It is not enough to revolt against a social order founded on oppression: one has to change it, and one can’t change it without understanding it.’ Moved as she was by the predicament of the poor, she also gave away a substantial portion of her income, so that workers could buy books for education classes. In addition, she began to teach at the office of the Labour Exchange, where she offered lectures on French as well as on Political Economy. While the miners of St-Etienne were ‘rough’ types, some of whom had served in the Foreign Legion, they were nevertheless much taken with Weil, especially after she had gone down a mine shaft with them and handled a pneumatic drill. At the Lycée, meanwhile, things went well. Weil continued to teach Philosophy and Literature, but did not follow a specific curriculum or use set textbooks, as she thought 9SIMONE WEIL these useless. Instead, she not only recommended alternative readings, but confidently followed her own teaching method. An auditor who came to inspect her teaching was impressed with what the students had learnt, but still predicted examination failure for most. His predictions came true: of Weil’s fifteen students, seven were presented for examinations, but only two passed. Intent on propagating the demanding work routine that she had come to appreciate in Alain’s classes, she always made her students write a lot, and stimulated them to engage in depth with her favourite authors: Plato, Descartes, Kant, Marcus Aurelius, Balzac, Stend- hal, and Marx. Her friend Gustave Thibon describes just how impressive a teacher she was: Her gifts as a teacher were tremendous: if she was inclined to over-estimate the possibilities of culture in all men, she knew how to place herself on the level of no matter what pupil in order to teach no matter what subject. I can imagine her carrying out the duties of an elementary school teacher just as well as those of a university professor! Whether she was teaching the rule of three to a backward village urchin or initiating me into the arcana of Platonic philosophy, she brought to the task and tried to obtain from her pupil that quality of extreme attention which, in her doctrine, is closely associated with prayer.'* Since her reputation as a political activist and ‘troublemaker’ had preceded her, Weil found herself under surveillance from the moment she arrived in Le Puy, and a police report was filed for the record. Requests for her dismissal followed soon enough, but the League of the Rights of Man took the matter up and duly defended her right to freedom of speech. However, the unemployed and the workers’ leaders were lumbered with fines, and at school the parents were becoming increasingly alarmed. In spite of student petitions and union support, Weil was eventually transferred. Throughout these troubled times, she never wavered in her support for the poor, went without heat and food for many days, and gave up a considerable portion of her wages. Before she transferred to Auxerre — in October 1932 — which she favoured for its proximity to Paris, she also travelled to Germany, primarily because she was curious about the activities of the Ger- man Communist Party vis-a-vis the Nazis. She decided to spend much of August in Berlin and Hamburg, and was greatly impressed by the culture of the German working class there. The Party itself, oennn nen NEE SIMONE WEIL’S LIFE however, whose political rhetoric did not seem to her to match its action on the ground, greatly disappointed her. In the various articles that she subsequently wrote on the socio-political conditions of Germany, she made a point of expressing her solidarity with the German workers, and agreed that the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which included territorial concessions and huge repara- tion payments on the part of the defeated Germans, was at least partly to blame for Hitler’s rise to power. Weil also felt that the victory of the Communist Party in November 1933, when it gained over 6 million votes, would not mean anything in practice, as the workers who constituted it had sunk into passivity, and the Party itself had been reduced to an inefficient bureaucratic machinery. The Communists, Weil believed, not only had an inadequate understanding of Nazism, which simply pandered to all those who wanted political change at any cost, but had refused to support the German proletariat. She thought it telling, for instance, that the three major contending parties (Social Democrats, Communists, National Socialists) had all proclaimed a socialist revolution, and that the Social Democrats, while opposing Hitler, nonetheless declined to collaborate with the Communists. At Auxerre, she was much liked by her students, who even helped her type material for the railway workers. Once again, though, only a small proportion of students passed the final examinations (four out of twelve), with the result that the school authorities subsequently abolished the Chair of Philosophy, and Weil was dismissed in June 1933. Her next teaching assignment, which began in October that year, was at Roanne, an industrial town with a population of 60,000, from where she still continued to travel the 65 miles to St-Etienne, both for public meetings at the Labour Exchange and to support the education of the workers. Colleagues at Roanne described her as ‘a fleeting, mysterious figure immersed in some great German book, such as Das Kapital, and thought she must be a Communist-atheist.'* Weil spent the Christmas of 1933 at home with her parents in Paris and, while she was there, even managed to persuade them to put up Leon Trotsky, who had come to France for a meeting with political friends and was looking for an appropriate venue. Weil was keen to take advantage of Trotsky’s visit and to talk to him, but the meeting turned out to be fruitless for both, as they disagreed on nearly everything. Trotsky left exasperated: ‘Why do you put me up? Are you the Salvation Army?’'* Not much later, a disenchanted Weil told her friend Simone Pétrement: ‘I have decided to withdraw ISIMONE WEIL from every kind of politics, except for theoretical research’.'” She also asked the authorities for a year’s unpaid leave from October 1934, ostensibly for ‘personal studies’, but her real intention was to gain first-hand experience of factory work. In December 1934, she started at the Alsthom factory in Paris. Her friend Boris Souvarine, who knew an administrator at the company, helped her with the venture. Weil stayed there for four months, until April 1935, occupied with drilling, operating a power press, and turning crank handles. The experience was rough. Not only did she have to put up with bullying, harassment, and injus- tices of various kinds, but with splitting headaches, toothache, and eczema. The work left her utterly exhausted and demoralised. She also found that women suffered more than men, as they were the first to get fired, and therefore had to be more competitive as well. There were no resting places or chairs anywhere. The threat of personal humiliation was both real and constant, and she was finding it increasingly harder to think. From April until May 1934, Weil also worked as a packer in Boulogne-Billancourt, then at the Renault factory in Paris from June till August 1934, experiencing the same drudgery as before. She soon realised that, far from prompting the workers to revolt, continuous oppression rather had the opposite effect and tended to induce apathy and passive sub- mission. Soon after this ordeal, she left with her parents for Por- tugal, where she had the first of three important encounters with Catholicism: I entered the little Portuguese village, which, alas, was very wretched too, on the very day of the festival of its patron saint. I was alone. It was the evening and there was a full moon over the sea. The wives of the fishermen were, in procession, making a tour of all the ships, carrying candles and singing what must certainly be very ancient hymns of a heart-rending 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.'* Weil’s next teaching assignment was in Bourges. In spite of her reclusiveness, the students liked her, calling her ‘la petite Weil’, though some of them also provoked her with articles which they knew would upset her. She joined the young factory managers’ association for their regular meetings, worked on a farm, and ‘in the fields ... never stopped talking about the future martyrdom of Jews, 12 eaeRTE agente eee SEE SIMONE WEIL’S LIFE poverty, deportations’.'® At the Rosiéres Foundries, she embarked on an experiment with a factory journal, Entre nous, which was to be produced entirely by the workers themselves. One of her own papers, on Antigone, was also published in it. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, in the autumn of 1936, Weil spontaneously decided that, her pacifist convictions notwithstanding, she had to go to Spain and support the Repub- licans in their fight against General Franco and his fascist sup- porters. She took the train for Barcelona and prudently travelled incognito as a journalist, the requisite certificate having been issued by a trade union in Paris. In Aragon, Weil joined the anarchist- syndicalist movement, but soon afterwards had an accident invol- ving hot oil, which caused serious burns to the lower part of her leg and ankle and made hospital treatment unavoidable. Unfit for further action in Spain, she reluctantly returned to Bourges in September 1936, proudly wearing her army cap and red scarf, and wondering whether one could, perhaps, steal cannons from the local arsenal and dispatch them to Republican rebels in Spain. Unfortunately, the Spanish venture had left her health in a pre- carious condition, and forced her to take sick leave during the first part of the 1937/38 session. By April 1937, she was sufficiently restored for a holiday in Italy, and so decided to travel to Milan, Florence, Rome, and Assisi. Michelangelo’s paintings and Leo- nardo’s Last Supper, in particular, made a deep impression on her, but it was in Assisi that she finally fell on her knees: In 1937 I had two marvellous days at Assisi. There, alone in the little twelfth-century Romanesque chapel of Santa Maria degli Angeli, an incomparable marvel of purity where Saint Francis often used to pray, something stronger than I compelled me for the first time in my life to go down on my knees.” In October of the same year, she was appointed Professor of Philosophy at the Lycée of St-Quentin, an industrial town close to Paris. C. Religious phase (1938-1943) Weil’s third important encounter with Catholicism occurred during Easter 1938, when she visited the Abbey of Solesmes. She had heard that the Gregorian chant in the Abbey’s church was particularly beautiful, and very much wanted to listen to it. In spite of 13SIMONE WEIL excruciating headaches, and much to the amazement of the local parishioners, she attended all the services from Palm Sunday to Easter Tuesday, and was overwhelmed by the beauty of the chants. A young Englishman, John Vernon, introduced her to the so- called ‘metaphysical’ poets, including George Herbert, whose poem ‘Love (III)’ she learnt by heart and kept reciting to herself. ‘It was during one of these recitations’, Weil tells us in her Spiritual Autobiography, ‘that ... Christ himself came down and took pos- session of me’.”! The experience, which occurred towards the end of 1938, was intense and deeply personal, something in which the feeling of Christ’s presence combined with a deep appreciation of the Passion and the reality of divine love, even in times of affliction. But profound though the experience was, Weil hardly ever talked about it, even to her closest friends. It was too ineffable and per- sonal to be expressed in words, let alone turned into an object of disinterested study. A few months later, in March 1939, German troops entered Prague. Weil felt that she could no longer maintain her pacifist attitude, and so decided to abandon it, subsequently reproaching herself for not having done so sooner: Ever since the day when I decided, after a very painful inner struggle, that in spite of my pacifist inclinations it had become an overriding obligation in my eyes to work for Hitler’s destruction, with or without any chance of success, ever since that day my resolve has not altered; and that day was the one on which Hitler entered Prague — in May 1939, if I remember right. My decision was tardy, perhaps; I left it too late, perhaps, before adopting that position. Indeed, I think so and I bitterly reproach myself for it.” In the summer of 1939, she applied for sick leave and once again travelled to Italy, to study some of her favourite paintings by Da Vinci, Giotto, Masaccio, Giorgione, Rembrandt, Goya, and Velazquez. After this Italian journey, Weil never taught again. But she continued to read avidly, especially Aeschylus and Sophocles, the ancient historians (Herodotus, Thucydides, Plutarch, Caesar, Tacitus), and works on the Middle Ages. In addition, she read through the entire Old Testament for the first time in her life. In the spring of 1940, she also took up the Bhagavad Gita and began to learn Sanskrit, so as to follow the text in the original. 14SIMONE WEIL’S LIFE On 13 June, 1940, the day before the German troops occupied Paris, Weil and her parents decided to escape to southern France, first to Vichy, and two months later to Marseilles, which had become the main gateway for those who wanted to leave the country. Once in Marseilles, Weil asked to be given a teaching post in North Africa, but her request was denied. Incessantly concerned about the plight of refugees, she visited a Vietnamese refugee camp, handed over her food coupons to the needy, and urged Marshal Pétain, whose collaborationist government was in charge of the unoccupied zone, to abolish internment as a way of punishing for- eigners who were in violation of residency regulations, and indeed to pardon all those who had already been interned on such grounds. In October 1940, the Vichy government released an anti-Jewish statute, which prohibited Jews from occupying leading positions in the army, the media, and the civil service, including education. Weil at once wrote to complain to the Minister of Education, M. Car- copino, urging him also to explain what, exactly, the term ‘Jew’ signified. Her letter finishes with the words: ‘If nonetheless the law demands that I regard the term “Jew”, whose meaning I do not know, as an epithet applicable to my person, I am disposed to submit to it as to any other law.’” She never received a response. While in Marseilles, Weil also joined the Resistance movement and played an important role in the dissemination of its influential underground newspaper, Cahiers de témoignage chrétien. At the same time, she tried to get ration cards for German refugees by inducing her father to sign false medical certificates and, on one occasion, was summoned by the police over an intercepted draft proposal for front-line nurses, which was her audacious plan for ‘a very mobile organisation’ that ‘should in principle be always at the points of greatest danger, to give first aid during battles’.* Unfor- tunately, her proposal for such a grand humanitarian gesture in the face of the enemy’s brutality and injustice was never taken up. From October 1940, Weil also began to write for Cahiers du sud, sometimes under a pseudonym (‘Emile Novis’, an anagram of her name), her finest contribution being the essay ‘The Iliad or The Poem of Force’. In June 1941, she encountered Father Joseph- Marie Perrin, a nearly blind Dominican priest, who had been introduced to her by her Catholic friend Heléne Honnorat. Perrin, known for his generous spirit and selfless devotion to the plight of Jewish and other refugees, soon became Weil’s friend and an invaluable interlocutor in their frequent philosophical and theolo- gical discussions of Christian doctrine. In one of her last letters to 15