The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas. By Robert Zaretsky

Abstract

In 1938, while spending Holy Week at the Benedictine Abbey of Solesmes in northern France, the philosopher Simone Weil (1909–43) underwent a profound mystical experience. Overwhelmed by the beauty of the monastic chant, she felt the Passion of Christ enter the core of her being, and was moved to appreciate, in her own words, ‘the possibility of loving divine love in the midst of affliction’ (Waiting on God). This proved to be a decisive turning point in Weil’s life: it led her to repudiate her Jewish roots and embrace Roman Catholicism. Although Weil persistently refused baptism, and was thus never formally received into the Catholic Church, her rejection of her Jewish identity, at the height of the Holocaust, has remained a matter of huge controversy. Susan Sontag, writing in the New York Review of Books, coloured admiration of Weil with an open-eyed reference to Weil’s ‘anguished and unconsummated love affair with the Catholic Church, … her gnostic theology of divine absence, … her ideals of body denial, … her violently unfair hatred of … the Jews’.