Patti Smith likes to visit the graves of artists and writers she admires, and she often writes about those encounters, accompanying her narratives with monochrome Polaroid photographs. In one of her more recent books, Devotion, she describes traveling to Ashford in Kent in order to pay respects to the memory of Simone Weil, the French philosopher and activist who was well-known from the 1950s to the 1970s, but who receives comparatively little attention today. Her grave is inconspicuous and not easy to find.
I can’t recall why I bought Weil’s Waiting on God many years ago, but it may have been because of the novelist André Gide’s remark, quoted on the cover, that she was the patron saint of ‘outsiders’. In any event, despite her dense style and obsessiveness, I soon grew to love the passion and austerity of her thought. But there may also be a wider context for my enthusiasm, one that is shared with Patti Smith. Laure Cagne, writing in her introduction to Weil’s Love in the Void: Where God Finds Us, says that it is not surprising that Weil, who died in 1943, ‘quickly achieved legendary status among a whole generation of countercultural intellectuals and spiritual seekers. Her writings are radically, vehemently anti-bourgeois, as was her short, intense life’. She adds that Weil ‘sought to uproot herself from everything - her parents’ solicitousness, the comfortable surroundings of her childhood, and even the normal benchmarks of academic achievement - to which she might form an attachment. Her goal was an untrammelled heart - the necessary condition, she believed, for knowing the truth’. It was for that reason that Weil, even though tempted to do so, was never willing to join the church.
What I do remember about my early reading of Weil’s writings is her emphasis on the importance of beauty in the world, the necessity of ‘attention’, which is an act that is close to what Buddhists call ‘mindfulness’, and her somewhat morbid attraction to suffering, which she called ‘affliction’. All of this explains why she has been regarded as a contemporary mystic, and it probably accounts for my own attraction to her books. After becoming aware of Patti Smith’s interest in her, however, my own curiosity was rekindled, and in the course of subsequent reading I discovered another side to Weil’s life, of which I was only dimly aware forty years ago.
Weil was an extremely clever woman, possessed of prodigious intellectual abilities, and in her early years she had little interest in overtly spiritual matters, although she soon became absorbed by ideas about truth, purity and poverty. This led to the development of a strong social conscience and activism, and after she began to teach in girls’ schools, she quickly came into conflict with educational authorities that strongly resisted her pronounced left-wing views. Weil supported workers in the towns where she was employed, engaging with marches, pickets, and writing articles for socialist journals. She gave away most of her salary. Before long she became a worker herself, taking jobs at a several factories in Paris, and was barely able to endure them. Partly because of her experience of poverty and suffering, she became involved with Christianity, despite her Jewish upbringing and ongoing attraction to Greek and other philosophies. Later, during World War II, she worked for the Free French in London. Deciding to fast in solidarity with soldiers at the front, whom she longed to join in active resistance to the Nazis, Weil restricted herself to what she believed were fighting men’s rations. She became ill with tuberculosis, malnourishment contributing to her predicament, and she died in a sanatorium in Kent, aged just thirty-four. The attending doctor described her death as ‘suicide’.
While thinking about Weil’s fate, Robert Bresson’s early film, The Diary of a Country Priest, based on a novel by Georges Bernanos, came to mind. It tells the story of a man who is determined to love others to the best of his ability and to trust in the reality of 'divine presence'. The setting of the tale is bleak and wintry northern France, its dark mood reflected in the priest’s face, which is perpetually solemn and withdrawn. His parishioners scorn and insult him; reluctant or unable to defend himself, he is unable to understand their hostility. The young priest suffers deeply, more or less stops eating, and becomes ill. At the end of the film he dies.
Although much of his politics was conservative and reactionary, Bernanos had no interest in bourgeois Catholic piety; he empathized with social outsiders, with people who were not at ease with themselves and even less with society. Feelings of shame, self-hatred, and estrangement are common in his books. The country priest, whose life has long been marked by loneliness and isolation, lives in fear of being mocked and rejected, but he is convinced that God loves us; he is also determined to be good to his fellows. From a Roman Catholic point of view these simple values are a way to salvation, and Elizabeth A. Dreyer observes that Bernanos’ novel ‘opens a window onto the difficult, beautiful, elusive presence of grace in the concrete, physical, "real" world.’ As the priest writes when faced with death, "Does it matter? Grace is everywhere.’
Looked at from a humanist perspective, the story might be described as a tragedy, the tale of a true, albeit misguided, believer who is faced with the incomprehension and rejection of a cruel society. In that respect The Diary of a Country Priest has some connection with Simone Weil. The idea of self-sacrifice for a metaphysical ideal is completely at odds with contemporary culture’s core beliefs, and there are many today who would respond both to the country priest and to Simone Weil’s life and thought with puzzled dismissiveness. One recent commentator, for instance, has observed that ‘though prissy, sanctimonious, and prejudiced, Weil’s writing still has something to teach us about disconnection in modern society, and how we can begin to reconnect’. Susan Sontag, sceptical about most aspects of Weil’s life and thinking, has put it more generously, remarking that ‘she is rightly regarded as one of the most uncompromising and troubling witnesses to the modern travail of the spirit’. Simone Weil might vigorously have argued that they are both completely missing the point.
https://www.plough.com/en/topics/faith/witness/who-was-simone-weil-introduction
https://aeon.co/essays/why-simone-weil-is-the-patron-saint-of-anomalous-persons
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-diary-of-a-country-priest-1951
https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/holiness-comes-through-humanness-not-opposition-it
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1963/02/01/simone-weil/