Simone Weil: An Introduction to Her Thought

120 Pages·1983·6.854 MB·English

by  John Hellman

SIMONE WEIL
An Introduction to
Her Thought
by JOHN HELLMAN
"The generation of 1930 in French
intellectual life was unique in the gravity of the chal-
lenges they faced." Simone Weil—the brilliant social
and political theorist, activist, and spiritual
writer—was one of an eminent company in the France
of the 1930s who responded to these challenges. In
her brief, remarkable life she wrote a host of essays
and letters and filled several notebooks with reflec-
tions. Hellman's volume sets out the single world
view—with its paradoxes and its logic—which ap-
pears behind her disparate writings but which she
never lived to set out formally herself. Hellman ex-
tracts the key themes in Weil's writings on Marxism,
Hitlerism, factory work, history, and religion, in an
effort to examine the seeming contradictions and in-
consistencies in her fusion of deep spirituality and
commitment to the poor and oppressed and her
love-hate relationship with Roman Catholicism and
Israel. The result is a synthesis of her thought as a
whole, drawn principally from her varied, fragmen-
tary writings, and seen in relation to her life and
personality.
John Hellman, a member of the History Department at
McGiJl University, is an associate editor of Cross Currents
and the author of Emmanuel Mourner and the New Catholic
Left, 1930-1950 and of articles on modern European intel-
lectual, political, and religious history. He holds the Ph.D.
degree from Harvard University.
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SIMONE WEIL
An Introduction to
Her Thought
To Etienne
SIMONE
WEIL
An Introduction to Her Thought
JOHN HELLMAN
Wilfrid Laurier University Press
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the
Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided
by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Hellman, John, 1940-
Simone Weil : an introduction to her thought
Includes index.
ISBN 0-88920-121-8
1. Weil, Simone, 1909-1943. I. Title.
B2430.W474H44 194 C82-095208-7
Copyright © 1982
WILFRID LAURIER UNIVERSITY PRESS
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3C5
84 85 4 3 2
Cover design: Polygon Design Limited
No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system, translated or
reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, microfiche, or
any other means, without written permission from the publisher.
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
1. Simons Weil in Her Times 7
2. The Insufficiency of Politics 17
A Brilliant Theoretical Insight 17
What Marx Had Not Foreseen 25
Factory Work 33
3. Patriotism and Hitler 37
Is God French? 37
On Patriotism: False and True 41
Hitler, the New Caesar 43
4. History, the Old Testament, and Roman Tradition 47
The Jehovah of the Bible versus the
Father of the Gospels 47
Rome: The "Great Beast of the Apocalypse" 52
The Roman Tradition in Western History 55
De-Romanizing Christianity 59
The Gathers and Romantic Love 65
5. Religion 74
Possession by Christ 74
Vll
viii Simone Weil: An Introduction to Her Thought
Non-Christians and the Love of God 77
Nurses against the S.S 80
The Unity of "Attention" 82
The Three Secret Presences of God 90
Conclusion 98
Appendix 104
The "New York Notebook" (1942) 104
Index 108
INTRODUCTION
Simone Weil's remarkable life would have brought
her renown even if she had never written a word. But, despite her
frequent illnesses and early death at thirty-four years of age in 1943,
and her lack of opportunity to formulate a major intellectual testa-
ment, she left some important intellectual achievements. Not only is
she remembered as one of France's most prominent political thinkers
of this century1—one of the most original and creative non-Stalinist
Marxists of her generation2—but she also left religious and
philosophical writings of great originality.
Albert Camus, who played an important role in publishing her
works after the Second World War, was particularly taken with her
early political thought and described her in 1951 as "the only great
spirit of our time."3 Camus, a lucid nonbeliever, has left few com-
ments on her later, more religious writings, but although her views of
Christianity were frequently described as heretical, and her differ-
ences with Roman Catholic doctrine were always sufficiently impor-
tant so as to prevent her from joining the church, she became one of
the three most important intellectual influences on Pope Paul VI4—
1 See, for example, Roy Pierce's Contemporary French Political Thought (London,
1966) which includes her as one of the six most important contemporary French
political thinkers along with Raymond Aron, Albert Camus, Bertrand de Jouvenel,
Emmanuel Mounier, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
2 For some of the extravagant praise which greeted her early writings see below,
pages 17, 23.
3 In L'Express, February 11, 1961, cited in Pierce, Political Thought, 121.
4 Peter Hebblethwaite, The Year of Three Popes (London, 1978), 2. The other two,
according to Hebblethwaite, were Pascal and Georges Bernanos.
1