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Ideas, on CBC Radio is running a five part series on Simone Weil. It features one episode on her life and then four on her political and mystical thought.
Weil was a French Jew who became a Christian mystic and died in 1943. She was an anarchist, and her writings were championed by the likes of Andre Gide, Albert Camus, T.S. Eliot, George Grant and Czeslaw Milosz. She wrote on affliction, suffering, sanctity, theology and philospophy. She identified with the working class, and styled herself as a slave.
On sanctity she wrote:
Today it is not nearly enough merely to be a saint, but we must have the saintliness demanded by the present moment, a new saintliness, itself also without precedent� . A new type of sanctity � is almost equivalent to a new revelation of the universe and of human destiny� . More genius is needed [to invent it] than was needed by Archimedes to invent mechanics and physics. A new saintliness is a still more marvellous invention.
Many people argued for her sainthood after she died, but she died having never been baptized and so this was impossible. Not everyone held this opinion of her however, and some commentators have questioned the portryal of her as a saint
She exhibited a few blemishes but perhaps the most damning was a streak of anti-Semitism that resulted in her thinking being regarded paradoxically by some writers. For instance in this great biographical sketch in New Criterion, Jillian Becker writes:
Let us consider this. Here was a well-provided-for, well-educated young woman who freely chose to regard herself as a slave and to starve herself to death while war raged, hungry children helplessly wasted away in the streets of the Warsaw ghetto, the living skeletons of actual slaves dropped into the dust at Bergen-Belsen, and human bodies were consumed night and day in the ovens of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The young woman in question was a thinker and writer respected even in her own time by intellectuals and leaders of opinion, but she said nothing about these atrocities. She let herself die in 1943 when millions of her fellow Jews were being murdered in the name of the �final solution of the Jewish question,� and she who claimed to feel a deep sympathy with the afflicted and even a longing to bear their suffering for them protested only against being classed as one of them. If Fiedler is right that Simone Weil epitomizes the moral ideals of our time, then we are morally adrift in an era of darkness.
More on Simone Weil later.
