In Search of the Absolute
Simone Weil. By J. B. Perrin and G. Thibon. (Routledge. 16s.)
EVERY age produces, if not the prophets it needs, the prophets it deserves, and Simone Weil's was a voice that belongs to the twentieth- century wilderness. One says this with a certain hesitation. Her Creative genius at its best, with its glimpses into the underlying reality of Creation, belonged to that order of spiritual insight which tran- scends the centuries ; but the negative aspects of her thought, that brought her into collision with the Church she loved, grew out of the agonising uncertainties that afflict this generation of men as no other.
" I am separated from truth," she cried despairingly, obsessed by the conviction that she was unworthy of grace, and if ever there was a time in history when this cry echoed through humanity, it is the present.
Born ih 1909 of an agnostic Jewish family in Paris, Simone Weil became a teacher of philosophy and a heterodox social revolutionary ; sought the martyrdom of labour in a chain factory ; clumsily inter- vened in the Spanish Civil War (she scalded herself with oil and was evacuated immediately) ; experienced a mystical illumination and embraced Christianity ; • went to America with her parents in 1942 and was tormented by the " unendurable moral situation " of having deserted her countrymen ; came to London and unsuccess- fully pestered the authorities to parachute her into occupied France ; died, finally, of self-imposed hunger in a sanatorium at Ashford in 1943, at the age of 34.
Stated in such bare detail Simone Weil's does not seem an un- characteristic life, yet to Father Perrin she seems " to have embodied and experienced within herself all the contemporary world as well as the whole of antiquity," and to the lay Catholic theologian, G. Thibon, she belongs " at the height where tongues, prophecies and knowledge fade away, but where that charity which is God remains forever."
Yet she defeated their understanding, sometimes to the point of exasperation. Catholic in all but formality, she repeatedly denied herself baptism because she disapproved of the narrow social authori- tarianism of the Church ; Jewish by birth, her anti-semitism reached a degree of pathological obsession ; her vivid insight was frequently obscured by hasty prejudices and the sort of metaphysical nonsense that is a consequence of using the Absolute as a yardstick with which to measure man ; preaching the necessity df humility, her excessive abasement was an inverted pride that provoked her friends to asperity and, although gifted with compassion, her intolerance of erring humanity caused a friend to admonish : " It's a good thing for the world that you are not God."
The Old Testament, for Simone Weil, was a kingdom inhabited by the Great Beast of the apocalypse. She held that nothing good had ever come from Israel—almost all the prophets were evil—and that Christianity and the Gospels have nothing to do with the Jews but " are the last marvellous expression of the Greek genius, as the Iliad is the first." The Jews were for her an 'accursed People created to crucify God, beyond redemption.
Yet she was more Jewish than she would own, and in her Jewishness is perhaps most readily intelligible. Her search for roots has been a characteristic quest among Jewish intellectuals who have grown away from their tradition by emancipation : it has led some to Israel, a few to the Church, many' to humanism. In her pursuit of the Absolute she could have found many analogies inside the great body of Jewish mystical writings, as in the Zohar and the Lurianic Kabbala with its metaphysical doctrine of the redemption. Insofar as she was a severe moralist, she stood close to Jewish tradition with its emphasis on the moral order as placing society in readiness for the state of grace.
But Simone Weil's emphasis on the need for suffering—" one must offer God a naked despair "—is most Jewish of all. Jews have .always compensated for their tribulations by a belief in suffering as a mark of God's favour and as a redemptive agent. How else could their history be endured ? Yet at a time which could truly be called the crucifixion of the Jews, when they withstood throughout Europe an unprecedented martyrdom and made a collective testimony with no parallel in recorded history, Simone Weil sought her own lonely symbolic punishment.
EMANUEL LITVINOFF
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