Jan's Reviews > Waiting for God

After reading her books, you have to ask, is Simone Weil a saint or is she crazy? After all, when she was ill with pneumonia, she allowed herself to eat just the amount she thought would be available to residents of German occupied France in the early 1940s – and starved herself at age 34.

Why should we read Weil? Susan Sontag tells us we often measure truth in terms of the suffering of the author. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Genet—and Simone Weil have their authority with us partly because of their conviction, their self-martyrdom.

Modern readers could not embrace the life choices or ideas of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, but ‘we read them for their scathing originality, for their personal authority, for the example of their seriousness, and for their willingness to sacrifice themselves for their truths.’ Simone Weil belongs in this category, ‘one of the most uncompromising and troubling witnesses to the modern travail of the spirit.’

Simone Weil was born into a family of wealthy, intellectual, secular Parisian Jews. In her early twenties she had a spiritual birth when in a Portuguese village she heard the wives of fishermen singing religious hymns. She felt Christianity was the true religion of the oppressed. Later she was moved by a chapel where St. Frances served, and by poem from Herbert.

Although she accepted Jesus as truth and beauty, she would never be baptized because she believed the same truth and beauty existed in the Greek philosophers, in Taoism, in Buddhism, in the Bhagavad-Gita and in ancient Egypt.

She also believed ‘The Church has borne too many evil fruits for there not to have been some mistake at the beginning. Europe has been spiritually uprooted, cut off from that antiquity in which all the elements of our civilization have their origin. . . It would be strange, indeed, that the word of Christ should have produced such results if it had been properly understood.’

She was also appalled by what organized religion could do when it became powerful, citing the Catholic Church’s record of the crusades, banning, and inquisition. She was similarly suspicious of Protestantism, which she felt to be too closely linked with individual nations. Plus, she felt too many parishioners assign importance to the rituals instead of striving to attain a personal understanding with God.

Weil saw Jesus as the perfect model of suffering. Weil believed that God's love becomes born or personified in us when we pay attention to others. This requires emptying ourselves of our own our interests and projections in order to be truly present to another person – similar to the kenosis of the early Gnostics.

She left her position as a philosophy professor where she was constantly in trouble with school administrators because of her involvement with the unemployed, her participation in labor protests and her difficulty dealing with authority. She worked in an auto factory, then in the fields working a farm.

Simone Weil tells us that the first principle of helping another is not action. It is to see and respect the other. She repeatedly notes that the greater the suffering of the other person, the harder it is truly to see and hear that person.

Weil reminds us how glibly we can talk about compassion, as if it were an easy thing, sometimes making it sound like little more than pity. However, true compassion requires us to allow suffering to disturb us and even sometimes to take us over.

Weil wrote ‘There should not be the slightest discrepancy between one's thoughts and one's way of life.’ Sontag responds that sanity requires some compromising, some evasions and even lies. Maybe that why Weil’s relentless searching makes us uncomfortable.

T.S. Eliot wrote ‘A potential saint can be a very difficult person. One is struck, here and there, by contrast between (Weil’s) almost superhuman humility and what appears to be an almost outrageous arrogance.’

Kenneth Rexroth wrote ‘Simone Weil was one of the most remarkable women of the twentieth, or indeed of any other century. She could interject all the ill of the world into her own heart. . . Her letters read like the more distraught signals of John of the Cross in the dark night.’

Pope Paul VI (who corresponded with Weil and tried to get her baptized) said that Weil was one of his three greatest influences, and Albert Camus said ‘Weil was the only great spirit of our time.’ I believe Sontag, Eliot and Rexroth are right. We may disagree with parts of what Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky and Weil said, but we can’t help but be struck by their searing insights.

Waiting for God is a collection of Weil’s letters and essays that were compiled after her death, and it is a full array of Weil’s thinking from baptism to friendship and from school studies to the nature of love. It doesn’t flow well because she never wrote a book in her lifetime; her books are all compilations of her letters.

I like one of Weil’s spiritual insights: 'An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God.'

I initially rated this book lower due to the lack of cohesiveness among the essays, but after time and reflecting on today’s reactions against immigrants, and with Brexit and Trump, I felt perhaps the world needs to hear more from someone who truly understood compassion and actually lived with genuine empathy for those less fortunate.