The Holy Fool

By most standards, Simone Weil was an absurd and unattractive woman. Almost constantly ailing, painfully humorless and so intense she was either irritating or ridiculous, she agonized through a short life of 34 years and died in 1943 in a gesture that seemed to typify her gift for futile heroics. She virtually starved herself to death in England by refusing, though she was weak and ill, to eat more than the wartime ration for her native France.

Her death left no particular gap--even among French intellectuals--because she had never seemed to belong anywhere. As a Jew she denounced everything Jewish; as a Christian she shrank from joining a church; as a political worker she had no faith in politics; as a revolutionary fighter she deplored reliance on force. Yet today Simone Weil is looked upon by an increasing audience as one of the outstanding religious figures of her time.* In the current issue of the Jewish monthly, Commentary, is a penetrating study of the "Saint of the Absurd" by Leslie A. Fiedler, associate professor of humanities at the University of Montana.

Baffled Love. Simone Weil's whole life, writes Fiedler, was a series of acts of self-dedication that fizzled into lugubriousness. As a young schoolteacher she rushed into left-wing movements and marched in picket lines, but the authorities refused to take her seriously enough to fire her. In order to "understand" the workingman, she took a job as a factory hand in an automobile plant (a decision "fundamentally silly, the illusion of the Vassar girl of all lands," says Fiedler), where she suffered not as a worker but as an intellectual, and ended up by getting pleurisy and having to quit. She enlisted with the Spanish Loyalists ("vowing all the while never to learn to use the gun she was given"), but scalded herself seriously with some boiling water and was rescued from a field hospital by her parents, "whose baffled but stubborn love was always coming between her and the denouement of agony to which she aspired."

She was continually involving herself in politics, but, says Fiedler, "unlike true political or social thinkers, she is never concerned with the solution to war or poverty, but always with their use. She fears more than anything the proffered hope, Utopian or 'practical,' which diverts the attention of the workers toward the future, toward consolation; the politics of redemption is, like any false religion, an opiate . . ."

Final Despair. "Agony," Simone Weil once said, "is the supreme 'dark night' which even the perfect need to attain absolute purity; and to attain that end, it has to be bitter agony." Writes Professor Fiedler: "This is a difficult doctrine in all times and places, and it is especially alien and abhorrent in present-day America where anguish is regarded as vaguely unAmerican, something to be grown out of, or analyzed away, even expunged by censorship; and where certainly we do not look to our churches to preach the uses of affliction. It is consolation, 'peace of mind,' 'peace of soul,' that our religions offer on the competitive market place; the means are different, the pew versus the analyst's couch or the newest bestseller, but the product promised is always the same: adjustment, the opposite of agony.

". . . To Simone Weil [Jesus' cry of despair from the cross] is more precious than the Beatitudes. 'The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in its not seeking a supernatural remedy for suffering . . .' she has said, and we remember that this was once, with perhaps more right, the boast of Judaism, before we swapped Job for Joshua Loth Liebman and the Prophets for 'community service.' Indeed, Simone Weil insists, his ability to suffer gives to man a superiority over God that would have been a cosmic scandal except for the 'incarnation.' "

Misery, according to Simone Weil, has the virtue of stripping the individual of the comforts and security which insulate him from God's grace. Atheists, through their unhappiness, may paradoxically be nearer spiritual reality than smugly contented believers. "Between two men who have no experience of God," she once wrote, "he who denies Him is perhaps closer to Him."

Terrible Purity. Simone Weil, Professor Fiedler writes, "desired desperately to be able to enter the [Roman Catholic] Church," but could never quite bring herself to do it. She is said to have helped convert others, however. A monk once told her: "You are like the church bell which calls others into the church, but itself must remain outside."

Though she excoriated all the Jewish elements in Christianity in favor of the Greek, Fiedler finds her "note of zeal, the willingness to scream, to be ridiculous, to offend the standards of decorum and good taste" make her "like Christianity in general, less Greek than Jew." She is in the tradition of "the prophet Hosea, the holy fool who married the harlot he had bought in the market place and called his son 'Ye-are-not-my-people!' The absurdity, the absolutism, the incandescence of the prophets survive in Simone Weil, and for all her blemishes, their terrible purity."

* Even though she is known in the U.S. chiefly for a few long essays, e.g., The Iliad, or the Poem of Force (TIME, Dec. 17, 1945).

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