THE French author Simone Weil (1909-43), from an assimilated Jewish background, was a philosopher, political activist, and Christian mystic, who had been rigorously trained on the École Normale Supérieure, in Paris. Throughout her life, she wrote philosophical texts which can be still read today. Unusually for a philosopher, she translated her thoughts into motion, becoming a political activist — at first, near a tiny Marxist splinter group, and once, famously, hiding Trotsky in her parents’ flat.
To understand the lifetime of working people, she spent a 12 months as a machinist in a factory. Later, she fought within 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 those 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Unknown and virtually unpublished before her death in 1943, in Ashford, Kent, her many writings have since then regularly appeared in print. Albert Camus was an early admirer. Her writings appeal to a wide selection of individuals. 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 12 months, the philosopher Dr Stuart Jesson gave a series of talks on Weil’s philosophy on the London Jesuit Centre. Whereas Rose, searching through a Freudian lens, celebrates Weil as an anti-colonial political philosopher, Dr Jesson sees in Weil a scientific philosopher and Christian mystic.
FOR many individuals, probably 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 will endure it with relative ease, especially if we experience it because of this of fulfilling what we see as our mission in life. Affliction is qualitatively more severe: it’s what crushes the soul, not only in its physical impact, but in addition in its emotional and social facets.
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 opposite 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, since it shouldn’t be only physically painful, but in addition 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 because 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 12 months as an unqualified machinist in factories near Paris, where she was the bottom of the low. As well as hunger and tiredness, she should have experienced infinite ribbing of a highly sexist kind. When she got here home within the evenings, she was too drained to think. Once you might have experienced affliction, she wrote, it never leaves you. It can render you mute. But it will possibly force you back on the love of God in a way that you might have never experienced before. And it will possibly open you to listen to the muted cry of one other one that has also experienced affliction. For these reasons, you may accept it — and even be thankful for it.
WHY do people still read Weil today? She believed that she had remained outside the formal boundaries of the Christian Church in order 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 specifically — that the Spirit might be lively outside the formal boundaries of the Church.
For me, it’s her definition of affliction which strikes probably the most powerful chord. If we were on the lookout for affliction in England today, we’d start with the survivors of kid 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 may at the very least partly explain the attraction of her work to a generation of English people.
In a time when all of the Churches are battling the query find out how to reply to the survivors of kid sexual abuse within the Church, might Weil have something to show 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 a whole lot 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 out there here; the complete 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 accomplished, he found that his pain and affliction didn’t disappear, but remained so severe that he needed psychological treatment. He didn’t regret this, because, he wrote, through his voice, the voiceless could ultimately be heard.
Dr Gervase Vernon is a retired GP and former medical report author for Freedom from Torture. freedomfromtorture.org