The religious philosophy of Simone Weil

Lissa McCullough is an independent scholar who has taught religious studies at Muhlenberg

College, Hanover College, and New York University. Previous books she has edited are

Thinking Through the Death of God: A Critical Companion to Thomas J. J. Altizer (with

Brian Schroeder), The Call to Radical Theology, and Conversations with Paolo Soleri.

“The Religious Philosophy of Simone Weil is a beautifully written exposé of one of the most

spiritually intense thinkers of the twentieth century. Shunning the cult of personality,

McCullough delves deeply into Weil’s thought, offering the reader a lucid exposition of a

spiritual path sustained by profound philosophical wisdom. The writing of this book, and the

reading it demands, are exemplary of the kenosis that is at the core of Weil’s mystical vocation.

We are all indebted to the author for this labor of love.”

—Elliot R. Wolfson, Judge Abraham Lieberman Professor of Judaic Studies, New York

University

“This book is a page-turner. It is totally compelling in the service of making available a

religious thinking on the border between Judaism and Christianity, and also on the border

between Platonism and Christianity; a thinking of God that continually troubles Christian

orthodoxy while embracing it passionately; a thinking of God beyond the idolatries of divine

presence. This is an extraordinarily readable text. The author’s meticulously close attention to

Weil’s own texts makes for the appearance of the stark beauty of Weil’s thought.”

—Cyril O’Regan, Huisking Professor of Theology, University of Notre Dame

THE RELIGIOUS

PHILOSOPHY OF

SIMONE WEIL

An Introduction

LISSA MCCULLOUGH

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Cover photo(s) from the personal collection of Sylvie Weil, used with her kind permission.

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978 1 78076 796 3 (PB)

eISBN: 978 0 85773 679 6

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CONTENTS

Abbreviations and Textual Notes

Introduction

1. Reality and Contradiction

2. The Paradox of Desire

3. God and the World

4. Necessity and Obedience

5. Grace and Decreation

6. Conclusion: Weil’s Theological Coherence

Notes

Selected Bibliography

ABBREVIATIONS AND TEXTUAL NOTES

FLN First and Last Notebooks

GG Gravity and Grace

IC Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks

LP Lectures on Philosophy

N The Notebooks of Simone Weil

NR The Need for Roots

OC Oeuvres complètes

OL Oppression and Liberty

PSO Pensées sans ordre concernant l’amour de Dieu

SE Selected Essays

SL Seventy Letters

SNL On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God

SWL Simone Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life

SWR The Simone Weil Reader

RM Miklos Vetö, The Religious Metaphysics of Simone Weil

WG Waiting for God

The bibliography contains full details for all references. An equal sign (“=”) in parenthetic

citations indicates that the same passage appears in two texts available in English. At points I

have slightly altered the English translations for accuracy or readability. Italicization is always

in the original text unless otherwise indicated. Citations of the Oeuvres complètes are by tome,

volume, and page (for example, OC 6.4.184), or tome and page (OC 1.72) for one-volume

tomes; all unpublished translations from the French are mine. Since the generic masculine is

present in Weil’s own French usage, I have allowed it to stand as historical and have not

attempted to avoid it in my commentary. All biblical quotations are taken from the Revised

Standard Version (RSV) of the Bible.

Weil’s extensive notebooks are the major primary source for her religious thinking. The

Oeuvres complètes published in 16 volumes by Gallimard (1988–2006) has made them

available in the original French in a superb critical edition (Cahiers, tome 6, vols. 1–4). In

English, the closest parallel we have is The Notebooks of Simone Weil (2 vols., Routledge,

1956), which spans 1940–2, combined with First and Last Notebooks (Routledge, 1970),

which made Weil’s pre-war notebooks (1933–9) and final New York and London notebooks

(1942–3) available in English for the first time many years later.

Portions of Chapters 2 and 5 of this book were integrated into a presentation at the

University of Amsterdam in March 2005 and published as “The Void: Simone Weil’s Naming

of Evil,” in Wrestling with God and with Evil: Philosophical Reflections, ed. Hendrik M.

Vroom (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 25–42.

INTRODUCTION

Where does religious feeling come from? From the fact that there is a world. (OC

1.402)

Since her death in 1943, acute interest in Simone Weil’s maverick personality and intensely

lived short life has tended to deflect attention away from sustained consideration of her

thought, or at least has diluted the quality of attention directed to it as something standing in its

own right. As Palle Yourgrau noted recently, “hagiography of Simone has provided a

convenient excuse not to take her ideas seriously.”

1 Serious exposition of her philosophical

and religious thinking has in effect been in competition with her biography. There is reason to

believe that Weil herself would have been intensely displeased with this, since she maintained

that every human being embodies a unique perspective on the world, and it is the distinctive

world-perspective, not the “personality,” that embodies a precious and irreplaceable value.

“To recount the lives of great figures in separation from the oeuvre itself,” she observed,

“necessarily ends up revealing their pettiness above all, because it is in their work that they

have put the best of themselves” (OC 2.1.351). Weil felt that her perspective on the world was

embodied most essentially in her writings, not in her actions, and certainly not in her personal

biography. In life she would tolerate no attention to her person, for the personality (la

personne), the natural self, “that which says I,” has a strictly negative value as something to be

“decreated” and rendered transparent, in her view, the better to refract the love of God in the

world without egoistic distortion.

Yet the world is not—any more than the self who says “I”—an end in itself, in Weil’s

thinking. Although it is to be loved with all possible loyalty, the world is but a sign or

metaphor of a reality that is more ultimately sacred: “The order of the world is providential

[…]. The world is God’s language to us” (N 480). If we learn how to read the world as a sign

or metaphor, having freed it from the distortion of all self-centered attachments, what the world

signifies to us is an anonymous presence of love. The name “God” is only a convenience for

speaking about this fundamental insight concerning reality. In Weil’s thought, God is never a

reified concept of dogmatic religion, but a naming of reality that becomes increasingly all￾pervasive and experientially certain as the dogmatic idea of “God” is dissolved as unreal.

Only when all idolatrous preconceptions and illusions concerning “God” are revealed to be

false does the hidden God emerge, the God encountered in the void.

Indeed, the void is Weil’s primary image of God as the inexistent ground of all existence.

Precisely because God is God, God does not exist (N 139, 127). If God existed as things in the

world exist, God would be a creature. Everything that does exist is destined to travel into the

nothingness of the void: the nothingness of the nonexistent God (FLN 310). Not only is it “God

who fills the void” (N 491), but conversely also “the void is God” (N 82). Any image of God,

therefore, that protects us from the truth of the void—suffering, loss, and death—is idolatrous

and illusory, for “to love truth signifies to endure the void, and consequently to accept death”

(N 161). But for the one who seeks it out, there is love in the void, a love that is the one true

value, the supreme good.

This anonymous God, encountered in the void, was to become the consuming center of

Simone Weil’s thought from the time of her late twenties until her early death in 1943 at the age

of 34. Earlier in her life she had professed agnosticism, and the subject of God was only

infrequently and rather abstractly an issue for her. When she did refer to God in her early

writings, it was the God of the philosophers—of Descartes, Spinoza, and Kant in particular—

who was meant, not the gracious God about whom she was later to write with passionate

firsthand knowledge: “When the guest is drunk, it is then that Christ gives him the best wine”

(FLN 113). As a young lycée professor with Rousseau in her intellectual background, Weil

noted that “God does not teach us anything about conscience; it is the conscience (liberty) that

teaches us something about God” (OC 1.402, see LP 171). Later, with her religious turn, she

would come to emphasize precisely the reverse order of determination: that supernatural grace

is the prevenient source of all conscience, most often “secretly” or anonymously, because it is

the sole source of all authentic and pure good (FLN 122).

Biographical Groundings

It was contact with the world—actually, a passion for the real—that effectively turned Weil to

God. Earlier in her life, Weil wrote, “my only faith had been the Stoic amor fati as Marcus

Aurelius understood it, and I had always faithfully practised it—to love the universe as one’s

city, one’s native country, the beloved fatherland of every soul” (SL 140). At first glance

Weil’s turn to God seems to be a metanoia, a change of mind marking a conversion from strict

agnosticism. From a deeper standpoint, though, this change exhibited such underlying continuity

as hardly to constitute a disjuncture at all. Weil’s commitment to amor fati simply deepened to

take on a more all-encompassing and sacred cast, and as it did she turned to language of God

and grace to articulate a love for the real—and for truth as the shining forth of the real—

which could no longer be adequately expressed in secular or nonreligious terms.

But at no point did Weil believe that overt religious language or “religious belief” are

necessary to authentic faith or salvation. Even the name of God is dispensable. Everything that

religious symbolism seeks to express is anonymously embodied in a pure, non-illusory love for

the world, embraced in full awareness of its ambiguous good and evil: “Not to believe in God,

but to love the universe, always, even in the throes of anguish, as a home—there lies the road

toward faith by way of atheism. This is the same faith as that which shines resplendent in

religious symbols. But when it is reached by this road, such symbols are of no practical use at

all” (N 469).

Weil recounted in an autobiographical letter, written near the end of her life in 1942, that

she grew up “in the Christian inspiration” (making no mention of the secular Jewish

background of both her parents, from which she sought to dissociate herself), and that she

adopted a Christian attitude with regard to the problems of life, even though the name of God

had no part in her thoughts. She had decided that the problem of God was one for which the

data (les données) are lacking here below, and in order to avoid reaching a wrong solution she

resolved to remain agnostic. She recounts, “I thought that being in this world our business was

to adopt the best attitude with regard to the problems of this world and that this attitude did not

depend on the solution of the problem of God” (WG 62).

Yet a thirst for purity and the quest for truth had already emerged as keynotes of her

vocation. At the age of 16, the “idea of purity, with all that this word can imply for a Christian”

(WG 65) took possession of her in a sort of contemplative thrall as she was absorbed in a

mountain landscape. She writes that the idea was “imposed” on her in an “irresistible” manner.

Thus in Weil’s youth there was some precedent for the several overwhelming experiences of

grace, culminating in 1938, that impelled her to begin using the name of God.

2

In the year 1942

she recalled this change: “the word God had no place at all in my thoughts […] until the day—

about three and a half years ago—when I could no longer keep it out.” Something wholly

unexpected had occurred; while in a condition of intense pain from one of her chronic

headaches, she had felt “a presence more personal, more certain, and more real than that of a

human being” (SL140). In the wake of this palpable experience of grace, the names of God and

Christ began to occupy her thoughts. She began not only using religious language, but also

directing sustained attention toward the very problem of God that she had long avoided, since

apparently it was not possible to make sense of her experience without exploring it

intellectually and critically.

Initially Weil resisted lending this mystical occurrence the full credence of her intellect,

however, believing that “one can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure

regard for truth.” In her reasonings about the insolubility of the problem of God, she had never

foreseen the possibility of “a real contact, person to person, here below, between a human

being and God” (WG 69). But after this contact, in the light of this experience, her writings

began to invoke supernatural grace (grâce surnaturelle), by which she means specifically: a

principle of thought and action not derived from the web of determinations governing natural

phenomena. The supernatural is wholly other than the natural, categorically.

By referring to the supernatural, Weil does not mean to invoke an occult or superstitious

belief in divine intervention, magic, or “miracle” in the commonly understood sense, but rather

a certitude concerning the illuminating and transformative power of pure love wherever it

occurs. Wherever love achieves a pure, unmixed presence in thought or action—and she insists

that such purity is extraordinarily rare in human life—it is “supernatural” (beyond the

principles of nature) in Weil’s sense of the word. Love that manifests this degree of purity is

not explicable by the mechanisms and energies of the natural order: it is “in” the world but not

“of” the world. This love is radically contrary to the fundamental principle of nature, which is

“gravity” (pesanteur) as she employs the term. Supernatural love is unconditioned by nature;

wherever it exists within nature (meaning in the purest part of the soul) it is an inspiration

directly from God.

Thus Weil’s religious turn came as a surprise not only to those closest to her, but most

overwhelmingly to Weil herself. As a consequence of the love of Christ that descended and

“took possession” of her (m’a prise), Weil became a religious thinker (WG 69). Her writings

record the metamorphosis of a secular and agnostic consciousness into a deeply religious

consciousness as the necessary movement of a mind and sensibility coming into greater

consistency with its experience. She revised her earlier materialist outlook without repudiating

it in any way, but rather retaining it in a new light. Weil maintained even more stridently after

these experiences that nothing is more intellectually corrupting than to harbor a “will to

believe” in God or supernatural truth that has not been attested—even forced on the mind—

through actual experience of grace. She continued to hold that skepticism and agnosticism are

preferable to idolatry and bad faith: “Among those in whom the supernatural part of themselves

has not been awakened, the atheists are right and the believers wrong” (N 238).

Where faith is absent, Weil considered it appropriate to maintain an attitude of undogmatic,

provisional skepticism concerning the question of God, pending a change in the nature of one’s

data. Although to speak of “contact” with God seems to contradict ordinary language, derived

as it is from relations between tangible objects, grace is a datum in the sense that it comes

from outside the bounds of our own volition, hence outside the givenness of our existing nature.

It is not part of us and not in our power, therefore it is something we receive by contact.

Experience of the transcendent seems a contradiction in terms, she admits, and yet the

transcendent “can only be known through contact, since our faculties are unable to construct it”

(N 242–3).

Our faculties cannot construct the effects of grace. What our imaginative and intellectual

faculties construct are religious symbols, ideas, and beliefs. The latter are our means of

approaching God through the intentionality of intellect and feeling, whereas the former are

God’s means of inspiring and acting through us. Although the two are routinely equated, Weil

distinguishes them absolutely. The latter is usually derived from the former—that is, actual

experiences of grace form the bases of appropriate religious concepts—but the two are distinct

movements that ought not to be confused: “It is not for man to go towards God, it is for God to

go towards man. Man has only to watch and wait” (N 272). Religious concepts are a

constructive means of watching and waiting for God, a means of hoping and asking for grace,

but they in themselves do not attain the object. Fulfillment is sola gratia, by grace alone.

As we will see, loving God, for Weil, is an indirect route to loving the world and its

creatures exactly as God loves them, with God’s own love. While Weil frequently employs

otherworldly language of “heaven” and images of transcending this world “here below” (ici￾bas), this otherworldliness is only one side of a dialectical movement; the other side entails

our return to the world as our true home and the proper object of our most sacred calling as

human beings. Weil writes of our duty to love the world as our homeland—the whole world

inclusively in all its particularity—as the embodiment of the providential will of God. Her

term for this love is amor fati. We prove that we belong to God by refracting God’s love into

the world, sacrificially and sacramentally, through our action and our work. Love of the world

is finally the whole point of talking about God, since loving God is simply a means of radically

transcending ourselves and our attachment to lesser goods in order to return to the world,

detached, purified, and transfigured by supernatural love—which is God’s love for the world

active in us.

Through this process of detachment and purification, which Weil calls decreation, the end

to be realized is a perfect poverty of spirit—“becoming nothing”—achieving a nakedness that

is not only a condition of love of God, “it is an all-sufficient condition; it is love of God” (N

282). Pure love for the world thus becomes the criterion of pure love of God. In fact, when it

is perfectly pure, as we shall see, love of the world is a participation in the absolute love of

God for God. When we become transparent to the love of God, it is God who loves the world

through us as if through a transparent pane of glass.

Reading Simone Weil

Our focus will be on the last few years of Weil’s reflections (1939–43), when language of God

and religious faith becomes prominent, even dominant, in her writings. The theological ideas

she recorded during these years occurred as a result of intensive contemplation of her own

experience in light of what she knew or began to learn of Christian symbolism, scripture, and

doctrine—as well as of non-Christian religious traditions and texts, in which she had an avid

and active interest.

3 Beginning from a largely incidental knowledge of Christianity, she

launched into experimental reflection on those symbols and concepts that had resonance for

her, forging a highly individual—some have said heterodox and idiosyncratic—theological

language as she went along. Brilliantly educated in philosophy, she tended to view whatever

theology she did read from a philosophical point of view (in the tradition of the French

moralists), believing that the only important difference between philosophy and theology is that

philosophy is accessible to few, whereas religion—at least in the best of circumstances—

becomes incarnate in an entire society. At no point did Weil study theological traditions

systematically, and though this may imply “willful neglect” on her part, it was perhaps this

disregard that allowed Weil to record and theorize her experience of faith spontaneously, free

of doctrinal preconceptions, with uninhibited forging of theological meaning as her sole

concern. Precisely this gives her religious thinking its atmosphere of immediacy, directness,

and realism.

Weil did not write books but was a prolific author of thematic essays, philosophical and

political articles, occasional reviews, and some 2,000 pages of meditative notebook entries.

Only a few essays were published in her lifetime. Her most stunning and original religious

thinking is scattered in her disparate notebook entries and passages of certain essays. This state

of the texts left for posterity would seem to belie the nearly unanimous claim among her

dedicated interpreters that Weil’s religious thinking forms a “coherent whole” (Springsted) or

“consistent whole” (McLellan), a “powerfully comprehensive vision” (Williams), a sort of

“system” despite the absence of any attempt to systematize (Milosz); one having a “profound

internal logic” and “organic connections” (Vetö), such that “her treatments of apparently

disparate topics do hang together and frequently cannot be adequately grasped or evaluated

without a view of the relation between them” (Winch). Moreover, she has “that marvellous

ability, found only in the greatest thinkers, to reflect the whole of her work in each of its parts”

(Rosenthal).

4

In the realm of thinking, coherence is power, and Weil’s thought undeniably manifests this

kind of power despite the fragmented form of its expression. Here the aphoristic writings of

Nietzsche are perhaps the nearest analog, notwithstanding that Weil could not abide reading

Nietzsche, whom she detested with an “almost physical” repulsion (SL 122): “he makes me

sick” (il me rend malade).

5 Nevertheless, what Erich Heller has written of Nietzsche also

holds for Weil: “His is the brilliance of sudden illuminations, often the wisdom of deeply

pondered paradoxes; and sometimes, of course, the shrill foolishness of the fool.” Like

Nietzsche, Weil is “the very opposite of a ‘systematizer,’” yet both exemplify the power of

coherent thinking, a coherence achieved through the deep pondering of paradox.

6

The coherence that is actually there in Weil’s fragmentary work must be patiently

reconstructed. Though such a reconstruction is by its nature not perfectible, this matters little as

long as the rough whole is brought forth with its most important insights intact. Weil’s restless

activity and the cataclysmic historical events of the mid-twentieth century were at least partly

to blame for the fragmentary and occasional nature of her writing. She was a refugee from

Nazi-occupied France in 1942 when she wrote to Jean Wahl:

I cannot detach myself sufficiently from what is going on to make the effort of

drafting, composing, etc.; and yet a part of my mind is continuously occupied with

matters absolutely remote from current events (though current problems are

indirectly related to them). My solution is to fill notebook after notebook with

thoughts hastily set down, in no order or sequence. (SL159)

But even setting aside the tumult in which she lived, the fragmentary expression of Weil’s

thought may have reflected her peculiar difficulties as a holistic thinker, however

counterintuitive that may sound. For her, all thought originates in a unitary feeling, and thinking

advances by distinguishing and isolating definite elements from an aggregate. Thus, ideas come

about by a process of dissociation, proceeding from a feeling of the whole to a conceptual

breakdown of its component elements in their interrelationship (LP 63). Weil betrayed in a

letter to her mother that this effort to dissociate ideas—to pry apart the “felt” whole—was the

most exhausting and agonizing aspect of thinking for her. Referring to her thought, she wrote:

“It’s a dense mass. What gets added to it is of a piece with the rest. As the mass grows it

becomes more and more dense. I can’t parcel it out into little pieces” (LP 1=SL 196). This

analytic effort on the part of the thinker calls for a reciprocal synthetic effort from the reader.

Whereas the writer must manage to break down the aggregate truth into communicable thoughts,

the reader must manage to “reconstitute” it, with the goal of arriving at a unitary synthetic

insight.

In general, Weil has not been well treated by commentators in this regard. Her work, as

David McLellan points out, has “too frequently been used to reflect personal preoccupations or

points of view” and has been “more often quoted piecemeal than studied at length” (Utopian

Pessimist, 2). Before her death, Weil herself was already pained by an awareness that readers

were accepting and rejecting bits and pieces of her work, failing to grasp its unitive

inspiration:

They listen to me or read me with the same fleeting attention they give everything

else, taking each little fragment of an idea as it comes along and making a definitive

mental decision: “I agree with this”, “I don’t agree with that”, “this is brilliant”,

“that is completely mad” […]. They conclude: “It’s very interesting”, and then go on

to something else. They haven’t tired themselves. (SL196–7=LP 1–2)

Clearly, although Weil recorded her thinking piecemeal, she did not want to be read or

understood piecemeal. She wanted her readers to discern the “indivisible dense mass” that

ever more overwhelmingly inspired and tired her genius, even unto death. The mortal

exhaustion of which she died in her early thirties was a consequence of the inescapable

responsibility that came with her gift; our less onerous responsibility, if we are inclined to

accept it, is to make an effort to receive it.

For all the lucidity of her style, Weil’s predilection for bold, unqualified statements poses a

challenge. The point of view from which she presents her thoughts can shift radically from

sentence to sentence, and she rarely qualifies her statements to clarify the shift. This proves

especially confounding in her dialectical language about God: whenever she writes of God we

must ask which God she means—or rather, which aspect of God as viewed from what point of

view? Careful attention to the dialectical perspective of each statement is crucial if the

structure that orders Weil’s “immoderate affirmations” is to be elucidated.

7 When elucidated,

Weil’s affirmations remain immoderate, to be sure, but remarkably coherent and cohesive. The

principal aim of this study is to elicit the dialectical structure that unifies the contradictions and

paradoxes of Weil’s religious thinking, the better to demonstrate how much consistent and

thoughtful method lurks in her “madness.” Her beyond-the-edge radicality is not mere accident

or appearance but is the direct expression of a stark, unsentimental, disenchanted, and

nonetheless profoundly joyful late modern religiosity, bringing light to bear on the darkest of

times.

In the case of Weil’s religious thinking there is a need in some sense to establish a text,

given that we do not have a sustained treatment from her, but a mass of disconnected notes and

a handful of more cohesive essays. The present exposition therefore offers a close reading that

quotes heavily from her writings, and when not literally quoting often paraphrases her words.

The heavy citation of sources is a necessary distraction, since the ability to locate specific

thoughts and concepts is crucial for building a fuller critical understanding of her work. The

purpose is to characterize Weil’s theological ideas as tenably as possible from within her own

perspective, using her own wording as an ever-present touchstone. This expository effort

emphasizes the most coherent and holistic reading possible rather than looking for

inconsistencies and logical holes, but with the conviction that, as a result of seeing the basic

whole, the problems and inconsistencies will become more visible.

Frequent interpretive extrapolation on my part—a certain amount of speaking “for” her—

may create the cumulative impression that I agree with everything Weil thought. That would be