Psalm for Simone Weil
From the highest heaven God throws a rope. Man either grasps it or not.
- From the New York Notebooks of Simone Weil
Sir, what is humanity
that you pay such attention to us,
or men and women
that you let us love one another?
Words slide from you, dropping down
to where you stride
over glaciers and rocks
and down the icy walks of the sea,
trailing behind you a rope, my Friend,
that we can grasp
or at our choosing,
cast away.
My poem “Psalm for Simone Weil,” written 20 years ago, is finally appearing in print in the current issue of Amethyst Magazine, which leads me to think that this might be a good time to re-publish the following essay which I originally wrote for the defunct Street Prophets site back in 2011. At a time when narrow-minded religious fanaticism is doing so much damage to our society in the form of recent Supreme Court rulings on women's freedom of choice, racial equality, and the human right to love, we need to remember this neglected French philosopher. Unlike the rigid Roman Catholicism of the Supreme Court majority of Alito, Robert, Thomas, Barrett, and Kavanaugh, she appreciated the beauty of the Catholic faith while remaining outside all formal creeds....
Simone Weil and the Primacy of Attention
Albert Camus called her "the only great spirit of our time" but she was certainly not what most people would call a happy or well-adjusted person. She was almost certainly anorexic and her death at 34 was probably due as much to self-starvation as tuberculosis. In 1930s Europe she was in the midst of radical movements, yet she was never really a part of them. As the Holocaust descended over Europe, she scribbled letters and notes, unable to strike effectively against the Nazis. As far as anyone knows, she never had an intimate relationship, emotional or physical, with any man or woman. And for all her intense intellectuality, all of her books are posthumous, based on her journals and letters.
But it was Simone Weil who said this about human happiness:
Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention
.
For her, the entire meaning of life was centered in that single concept of attention. "Looking is what saves us," she wrote. "Attention is the sincerest form of generosity." In our media-saturated culture when there so are so many competing claims on our attention , from the outright false and trivial to the most vital, it is worth recalling the singular importance of this virtue.
Born into a secular Jewish family, steeped in the classics and in philosophy, and fascinated by the Catholic Church, she saw no enduring value in any doctrine:
A doctrine serves no purpose in itself, but it is indispensable to have one if only to avoid being deceived by false doctrines.
Instead of any particular religion or philosophy, what animated this isolated woman was compassion for the oppressed:
Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.
She grew up in a supportive and politically radical family, and at the age of ten she informed her parents that she was she was a Bolshevik and would be reading the communist newspapers. Her parents were sympathetic to the exiled Leon Trotsky and hosted a meeting for him in their Paris apartment in 1930, where young Simone engaged him in fierce debate. She was incapable, however, of surrendering her independent judgment to any ideology and by the time she was in the university, she wrote papers sharply critical of Marxist theory.
Nonetheless she continued to oppose capitalist systems of production, not so much because the elite own the means of production but because another more fundamental conflict had been added, "by the very means of production, between those who have the machine at their disposal and those who are at the disposal of the machine."
Her classmate Simone de Beauvoir describes the young Simone in her own memoirs:
She intrigued me because of her great reputation for intelligence and her bizarre get-up. A great famine had broken out in China, and I was told that when she heard the news she had wept: these tears compelled my respect much more than her gifts as a philosopher. I envied her having a heart that could beat right across the world. I managed to get near her one day. I don't know how the conversation got started; she declared in no uncertain tones that only one thing mattered in the world: the revolution which would feed all the starving people of the earth. I retorted, no less peremptorily, that the problem was not to make men happy, but to find the reason for their existence. She looked me up and down: 'It's easy to see you've never been hungry,' she snapped.
Another idiosyncrasy setting Simone apart from the radicals of her time was her publicly announced decision to live a celibate life as part of her commitment to the working class struggle, prompting her fellow students to call her "the Red Virgin."
It is not surprising that Simone's career as a secondary school teacher quickly led to dismissal from her first and second jobs as she set out to radicalize her students and to organize unemployed workers. And it didn't help that even her best students failed to pass the rigorous national exams. When a teaching career became impossible, she took a job as a piece worker in a Renault factory with the goal of organizing the workers. Due to her poor manual dexterity, this career also was unsuccessful.
In1937 she left for Spain to join the anarchist army fighting Franco's fascists.Simone was not much of a soldier, however, and failed even at target practice. After an injury involving a cooking pot and boiling oil, she returned to France just before her entire unit was massacred.
Coming back from Spain, she was probably severely depressed. And it was at this point that after months of inward darkness, she became very conscious of a personal God. "We do not have to search for Him," she wrote in her journal. "We only have to change the direction in which we are looking."
She experienced a divine comforter beyond doctrine and dogma: "He cannot refuse to come to those who implore him long, often and ardently." And "if we agree to his entry, he comes. As soon as we cease to want Him, He vanishes."
Simone saw no contradiction between this loving God and atheism: "An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God." And she seemed to think that the soul did not outlast the body.
Her association with Roman Catholicism grew out of a friendship with the priest Joseph-Marie Perrin. That personal relationship may be why she turned toward Catholicism, rather than seeking out equally rich spiritual traditions within Judaism, in an effort to explain her experience of God. One might think that the close association between fascists and Catholic hierarchy, notably under Franco, would have made the Church unappealing to her, but evidently she was able to separate her personal experience of the divine from any feelings about the institution.
Simone began to attend Catholic services but resisted all urging from Father Perrin to actually convert and accept baptism. In her notebooks she reveals the extent to which this turn toward religious faith was rooted in a self-abnegation perhaps akin to anorexia:
Weil wanted nothing so much as to lose herself altogether: "May God grant that I become nothing," she wrote in a notebook entry that would later be included in Gravity and Grace. "We must become nothing, we must go down to the vegetative level; it is then that God becomes bread."
In 1942 she fled to the US with her parents to escape the Nazis but was soon back in England where she offered her services to DeGaulle's Free French. Her proposal to organize a unit of nurses who would parachute into France to aid the resistance went nowhere. And as she insisted on limiting her own food intake to the same rations allotted to those in occupied France, she contracted tuberculosis and died in 1943.
The narrative of her short life certainly seems, on its surface, a tale of neurosis and failure. And yet her intense and very private writings reveal a rich inner life that is fascinating for anyone interested in the nexus of spiritual exploration, personal psychology, and political activism.
For me, the most intriguing aspect of her thought is her concept of attention, which she emphasized almost to the point of downplaying the need for action. By her lights, people need attention second only to food. (And one cannot help but wonder how large a part attention or the lack of it played in her own life.)
She must have been talking about something beyond what most of us mean by this common word, some recognition of an inner godhead perhaps: "The capacity to give one's attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle."
And in a time when a debate over mere numbers obsesses our politics and media, she reminds us that:
The needs of a single human being are sacred. Their satisfaction cannot be subordinated either to reasons of state, or to any consideration of money, nationality, race, or color, or to the moral or other value attributed to the human being in question, or to any consideration whatsoever.
She never lost the anarchist's distrust of power and she was very aware of how effective brute force is in destroying human potential, as is happening this very moment throughout the world:
Who were the fools who spread the story that brute force cannot kill ideas? Nothing is easier. And once they are dead they are no more than corpses.
and
When once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder.
She is, to be sure, a troubling figure, so well-intentioned and yet ultimately so self-destructive. If you are interested in exploring her thoughts further, my experience is that her essays collected in Waiting for God (1950) are a good starting point.
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