Of Poverty and Potency. The Reluctant Mysticism of Simone Weil

I have recently re-read "Waiting on God", a collection of letters and essays by Simone Weil, an extraordinary woman remembered by her iconic refusal to yield to the ways of this world. This has prompted me to look a little further into her life and writings in order to better understand the roots of her obstinacy and her determination to cut through both the deluded drives of an industrial civilisation in its death throes and her own attachment to the things of this world - even to the point of her own physical survival.

Simone Weil offers a clarifying perspective for a world that has lost all sense of its own addiction to destructive and dehumanising ways, and to what religious historian Alex Nava has described as "the madness of reason and the insanity of much of our politics, economics and social lives."

Despite Susan Sontag's frustration with "the fanatical asceticism of Simone Weil's life, her contempt for pleasure and for happiness, her noble and ridiculous political gestures, her elaborate self-denials, her tireless courting of affliction", Weil remains a rare and precious presence in the intellectual and spiritual life of the twentieth century. Despite her eccentricities and extreme self-privations, she embodied a searing analytical intelligence capable of uncovering the pathologies of power and its exercise, a social consciousness grounded in empathic identification with the oppressed and the poor, a deep mystical understanding born of unsought and unanticipated transcendental experiences, and a prophetic insight that demanded the renewal of commitment to universal justice. Although she died at the age of 34 years, her life and writings remain a well-spring of passion for human freedom and compassion for human affliction.

Simone Weil was born in Paris of Jewish parents on February 3rd 1909. Her unusual sensitivity and intelligence were evident from an early age. When she was six years old, she declared at the family table that she would no longer eat sugar but would send her portions to French soldiers who were fighting on the front. Such acts of self-denial and identification with those suffering privation due to war or famine increased during the course of her brief life and culminated in a virtual self-immolation in the months prior to her death in England in 1943, where despite her ill-health, she refused to consume any more food than was eaten by her near-starving countrymen and women in occupied France.

While still a young child, she had committed to memory entire tracts of the French poet and tragic dramatist, Jean Racine. By the time she was 12 years old, she was studying ancient Greek texts. At the age of 15, she commenced her formal studies with the philosopher and essayist Emile Chartier in preparation for the entrance exam at the National University in Paris. Three years later, Weil achieved the top score in the exam, followed by her class-mate, Simone de Bouvoir who came in second. In his article, "Prophetic Mysticism", Alex Nava describes an encounter between these powerful women at the time:

"While Weil was preparing to take the entrance exam for the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure, she was approached by the young Simone de Bouvoir who was fascinated by the reputation of Weil's intelligence, ascetic appearance, and sensitivity to others' suffering (apparently some students had found Weil weeping for famine victims in China). During their conversation, Weil proclaimed that the only thing that mattered was the revolution that would feed all the starving people on earth. Bouvoir responded by saying that the problem is to find a reason for human existence. Looking her up and down, Weil retorted, 'It's easy to see that you've never gone hungry.'"

While at university, Weil immersed herself in a study of the classics and of political and economic systems, particularly Marxism. Her graduation thesis, entitled "Science and Perception in Descartes", argued that Descartes' method was in large part responsible for the unbalanced approach to knowledge and reality that had corrupted much of European thinking.

After graduation, Simone Weil taught philosophy at a girls' high school in the town of Le Puys near the French Alps. She lost no time in becoming politically active, throwing in her lot with local unemployed workers and writing prolifically on leftist politics and labour issues. She soon became known as the red virgin because of her anarchist leanings and her undisguised asceticism. Her nonconformist and challenging views proved too much for the locals, and she soon found herself transferred out of the area.

On hearing about the political activities of Adolf Hitler, she went to Germany in 1932 in order to see for herself what was happening there. Simone Weil continually sought to understand the political currents that were sweeping through Europe and Russia at the time. She had long contested the nature of war and the pursuit of conquest through her close studies of the Greek and Roman Empires and was clearly trying to discern the hidden forces that were at work in Europe at that time.

By the time she returned to France, Simone Weil had undergone the first of what was to become a series of major life transformations. She spoke strongly and critically about developments in Germany. She had also come to understand the tyrannical nature of Stalin's rule in Russia. She saw the similarity of what was happening in both countries and described Stalin's programs as "indistinguishable from the fascist program."

Her judgement was confirmed in a disastrous meeting with Leon Trotsky at around that time. She came to realise that truly revolutionary change did not rest on the implementation of political programs based on theories of history and class structure, but on the need to consciously direct educational programs towards the development of a capacity for attention and critical thinking. In her later writings, she urged educators to work towards the creation of conditions that would enable "enough room, enough freedom to plan the use of one's time, the opportunity to reach ever higher levels of attention, some solitude, some silence."

Weil came to accept that despite her intellectual understanding of the forces that acted through history, she remained largely in the dark regarding how most people actually lived and worked. In 1934, she left the academic theatres of Paris and began working as a labourer building electrical components, and later, joined the assembly line at the Renault factory. Joshua Glenn reflects on her experiences:

"She was so traumatised by her experience of factory life . . . that she immediately abandoned any remaining romantic notions she'd had about the proletariat and her (or anyone else's) ability to help them. Oppression does not result in rebellion, she'd discovered, but in obedience and apathy - even in the internalisation of the oppressor's values."

Maggie Ross offers her own view of that particular time in the life of Simone Weil:

"Her own experience with manual work broke her. In her vulnerability, she identified with others who were also despised and rejected, although doubtless for different reasons. Through her experience of work and of the world's contempt for fragility she strengthened her passion for truth, justice, and the respect of the human person."

Her time in the factories made her aware of the deeper levels of oppression that supported industrial civilisation: "Things play the role of men, men the role of things. There lies the root of the evil." She witnessed directly how the methods of industrial production had stripped many individuals of the capacity to develop the skills that enabled them to engage personally and creatively in their daily activities. She came to understand that factory workers were victims of new forms of enslavement where their workplace activities were largely determined by machines.

Having put aside the thought that universal human freedom could be won through a workers' rebellion, Weil was now ready to test the notion that armed struggle offered a way of liberation. When the newly elected Spanish Popular Front was attacked by General Franco and the Spanish military forces in July 1936, Weil - along with numerous other European socialists - went to Spain to join the Republican cause. In a dramatic but bizarre and ultimately impotent gesture, she took up arms. Joshua Glenn describes what followed:

"The frail, near-sighted intellectual joined a unit of anarchists, was issued a rifle and almost immediately put her foot into a pan of boiling oil. Her ever-protective parents, lurking just over the border, yanked her to safety. Dismayed by the atrocities she'd seen her own side commit, Weil was confirmed in her pacifism."

Simone Weil's attention progressively moved away from overtly political activity and more towards active reflection on the metaphysical dimensions of human life. She immersed herself in a study of the Gnostics, of Buddhism and Taoism, the writings of Pythagoras and his school, and Homer's Iliad. She was particularly drawn to the Bhagavad Gita and taught herself Sanskrit in order to read it in the original.

Throughout this time, she was plagued by blinding headaches and episodes of extreme fatigue that made it impossible to work. She was later to write: "For 10 years it has been such, and accompanied by such a feeling of exhaustion that my attempts at concentration and intellectual work were more often than not as devoid of hope as those of a man condemned to death awaiting execution the next day." Simone Weil is careful to make a distinction between suffering and what she terms affliction, a state that she was intimately familiar with:

"Just as truth is a different thing from opinion, so affliction is a different thing from suffering. Affliction is a device for pulverising the soul; the man who falls into it is like a workman who gets caught up in a machine. He is no longer a man but a torn and bloody rag on the teeth of a cogwheel."

Weil sublimated such experiences of pain and limitation and used them as a means of joining empathically with the pain of the world, and eventually, with the Passion of Christ.

Soon after, she was to be shaken in ways that she could never have anticipated. Three separate events completely altered her understanding of the world and her place in it. The first occurred in Portugal after an especially debilitating series of migraines. She found herself in a small fishing village at the time of a celebration for the patron saint of the village. She describes the event:

"It was the evening and there was a full moon over the sea. The wives of the fishermen were, in procession, making a tour of all the ships, carrying candles and singing what must certainly be very ancient hymns of a heart-rending sadness. Nothing can give any idea of it. I have never heard anything so poignant unless it were the song of the boatmen of the Volga. There the conviction was suddenly borne in upon me that Christianity is pre-eminently the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and I among others."

Despite the fact that she had lived as a secular Jew, and had earlier in her life made a conscious decision not to pray, having considered the notion of God to be "a problem the data of which could not be obtained here below", she unexpectedly found herself drawn into an engagement with the ageless suffering of all human communities. Despite her life-long tendency to keep herself separate from all groups, she found herself in mystical union with the larger and invisible body of humanity who lived within the universal reality of oppression and suffering.

In 1937, she experienced a second revelation while in Assisi. She writes: "There, alone in the little twelfth-century Romanesque chapel of Santa Maria degli Angeli, an incomparable marvel of purity where Saint Francis often used to pray, something stronger than I was compelled me for the first time in my own life to go down on my knees."

Her final epiphany occurred a year later, again at a time when she was suffering near-intolerable pain. Weil spent 10 days at Solesmes in France attending the liturgical services held in local churches between Palm Sunday and Easter Tuesday. During that time, she underwent an Ignatian transformation in which "the thought of the Passion of Christ entered my being once and for all." It was then that, in her own words, "Christ himself came down and took possession of me."

For most of her short life, Simone Weil felt intensely the unsatisfactory nature of earthly life. Even as a child, she had identified with the pain and privation of young French soldiers mired in the battle fields of Europe. Despite her own relatively comfortable circumstances - her father was a doctor - as soon as she had won her first freedoms, she actively took on the cause of the poor and of unemployed workers. She had directed her incandescent intelligence to writers who offered an analysis of the causes of poverty and oppression and the means of overcoming it, but found their suggested solutions served only to replace one form of oppression with another.

As she gradually retreated towards ideals that lay far beyond the messy domains of human existence, she never abandoned her quest to articulate the nature of the pathologies of power that had perennially thwarted human aspirations for peace, fairness and justice.

And despite her own encounters with the ineffable in Portugal, in Assisi and at Solesmes, she came to accept that the God invoked by so many throughout history was an absent God, a God removed from this world, though paradoxically, unlike the deceased God of Nietzsche, a God who could be humanly experienced.

Vincent Di Stefano D.O., M.H.Sc.
January 2011


RELATED POSTS

1. Simone Weil and the Poem of Force. From the Fields of Ilion to the Charnel Grounds of Europe

Even as a child, Simone Weil had an understanding of both the deprivations and the depredations of war. At an age when most children can barely see beyond their own shifting desires, Simone Weil had fully grasped the reality and the meaning of sacrifice. She was six years old in 1915 when the immolation of Europe by military force and blind violence had already crossed unspeakable thresholds. . . .

Of Love and Medicine

I recently had cause to spend some time in the emergency ward of a small public hospital. Such spaces are mercifully beyond the usual experience for most of us but can occasionally and unexpectedly irrupt into our lives, projecting us into a foreign world where the full force of technological medicine is on hand to deal with human pain and the effects of trauma. On entering such places, one necessarily abandons all autonomy. One is no longer free to make choices as one's situation is effectively taken charge of by those who minister in these difficult environments.

The emergency ward of public hospitals is a unique manifestation in the historic mission of medicine. The only parallel that comes to mind are the war fields that have bloodied the memory of every nation, places where military doctors and their attendants have perennially attended the shocking injuries suffered by combatants. In such situations, decisiveness and experience count far more than do theory and reflection.

Yet even the war fields of history are categorically different to the modern emergency ward. They may share the same sense of urgency, the chaotic atmosphere and the range of traumas that are dealt with in emergency wards, but very little else. The modern emergency ward is a dedicated space peopled by highly skilled and knowledgeable individuals who have immediate access to the powerful technologies of medical science that enable rapid diagnoses to be made and radical interventions to be implemented. Yet beyond the extraordinary equipment and the bewildering array of drugs that are on hand, such places are staffed and administered by human beings. And once the flow of blood is staunched and the immediate crisis resolved or mitigated, it is the human side of the experience that will resonate the longest. We may remember the procedures administered, but we are more likely to carry a deeper memory of the individuals who administered them. There is much that can be done to soften the edges of difficult experiences.

Many who find themselves admitted to an emergency ward will be in a state of fear or distress. On the morning I was admitted, I could clearly hear the cries of two young infants, one of whom had a broken arm, the other suffering inconsolable internal pain. Their sobs and wailing filled the ward. In a cubicle nearby, an older woman, pale and alone, lay silent in her bed. Further down the corridor, there was much movement around a younger woman who was in obvious abdominal pain.

The morning was continuously punctuated by the steady ringing of alarm bells from automated heart and breathing monitors, my own among them. And through it all, there was a slow and steady arrival of new patients on ambulance trolleys and from the waiting room. There were some moments of relative quiet, but the overall atmosphere was one of constant movement with occasional ripples of chaos.

Within this complex mix of attention, emotion and movement, there were some things that were clearly evident. Foremost was the presence and skill of the nursing staff. Even while fulfilling such duties as inserting catheters, drawing blood and keeping a watchful eye on electronic monitors and intravenous drips attached to many of the patients, most took the time to talk, to smile, and to lift the mood in whatever way they could. I asked about their own experiences of working in such places. I soon learned that after the immediate danger to the patient was resolved, much of the work became routine. That is the nature of biomedicine. There are standard methods that are universally applied once a diagnosis is established. There are standard procedures for the treatment of acute asthma, acute diabetic hypoglycaemia, myocardial infarct, simple and compound fractures and so on. The technical side of things is tightly controlled, and formal procedures are strictly followed. But once the acute danger has passed, the patient is still left with the experience itself, the emotional reverberations, the fears, the uncertainties. And these are the domains where technical skill is of only limited usefulness.

Bridging the Distance

Another thing that soon became evident was the fact that some within the casualty ward were quite comfortable getting in close to patients - both physically and metaphorically - while others preferred the impersonality of distance. The latter was clearly the case with the medical officer who was in charge of the unit on that particular shift. He spent most of the time hovering around a computer monitor in the central base station. The station was located about 20 meters away from my own cubicle, and there were several times when we had direct eye contact.

I had an unobstructed view of what happened there and was fascinated by what I saw and heard. The doctor in charge loudly discussed the situation of the various patients - myself among them - weighing up different possible interventions with the junior physicians who had taken the history and performed the testing procedures. He did not appear to actually leave his post in order to meet with or talk to the patients whose situation he was discussing. I found myself somewhat discomforted by the impersonality of his style, where he referred to patients as a nameless "he" or "she" despite the fact that most were within visual and probably aural range. It was not that he was too busy to examine or meet with patients directly. There were many times when he engaged in small talk with fellow staff, and occasions where he took the time to fetch a can of Coke from the dispensing machine.

During the early afternoon, my attention was drawn to a middle-aged woman, very affable in appearance and manner, who hovered around the base station, occasionally disappearing into a cubicle and reappearing shortly after. She was wearing a vest with the word "Volunteer" conspicuously printed in day-glo letters across the front of it. I reflected at the time on how that clearly marked her out as "other" among the many who were ministering to the various needs of the patients. I thought at the time that this labelling was probably for the benefit of the medical staff, yet reflected that a more subtle sign or indicator would be no less effective as a marker, but would allow her to move more anonymously as a caring human presence in an environment where human caring was so desperately needed.

Another aspect of the experience that remains vivid was that once patients were no longer in a state of crisis, they were generally left alone unless they were fortunate enough to have family members or personal friends with them. This is clearly part of the peculiar dynamic of the emergency ward, where all medical skill and expertise is directed towards the needs of those in acute distress. Yet this experience brought to mind those patients whose conditions were relatively stable, but who needed hospitalisation for whatever reason. I recalled the times when I had visited my father during his final illness, and the apparent desolation of many who spend their days and nights in hospital wards.

Seeing the woman with the "Volunteer" label on her vest made me very aware of the immense reserves of good-will that lie hidden within the general community, of the capacity of many to serve as conduits of human caring and fellowship in difficult conditions and in difficult times. It also unexpectedly reminded me of an observation I had often made during my years of teaching natural medicine. And that is the fact that many who took on formal studies in natural medicine - at least in Australia from the late 1970s to the late 1990s - were nurses who had trained in hospital medicine, but who were moved to find ways of better meeting the deeper, the more human needs of individuals afflicted by sickness and suffering.

Other Ways

The creation of the first university-based program in natural medicine in Australia at Southern Cross University in Lismore in the early 1990s was largely driven by an heroic group of nurses who single-handedly deflected attempts by a hostile Australian Medical Association to have the course terminated before it had even begun. These women had experienced both the successes of and the failures of hospital medicine and directed their collective energies to softly enabling other ways of ministering to human sickness and suffering.

Those who enter the portals of scientific medicine are among the highest scoring candidates in the subject areas of physics, chemistry and mathematics in their university entrance exams. There are many who would argue that the attainment of mastery in such discipline areas is not necessarily the most important attribute for those who would serve within the healing professions. As Eric Cassell wrote in 1976, "One of the most important tools of medicine is the person of the physician himself. Medicine is concerned with the care of persons by persons, as simple as that."

Although there has been some small movement to incorporate more humanistic elements into medical education, it remains rigorously scientific in its orientation. American physician Rachel Naomi Remen commented in 1996: "In some ways a medical training is like a disease. It would be years before I would fully recover from mine." Mercifully, there are many practitioners of biomedicine who do survive their training and who quietly rediscover the perennial art of the physician as they work within their respective communities.

There remains much to be done to further the incorporation of those human qualities, which are at least as important as technical skill, into medical education and training. To repeat a comment by Fritjof Capra quoted in an earlier posting, "In medicine, intuition and subjective knowledge are used by every good physician, but this is not acknowledged in the medical literature, nor is it taught in our medical schools. On the contrary, the criteria for admission to most medical schools screen out those who have the greatest talents for practicing medicine intuitively."

Perhaps the final word on this has been offered by Rachel Naomi Remen in her Kitchen Table Wisdom. Stories that Heal: "For all its technological power, medicine is not a technological enterprise. The practice of medicine is a special kind of love."

Vincent Di Stefano D.O., M.H.Sc.
December 2010