Simone Weil

Robert Coles

Description

A brilliant portrait of a beloved and controversial
figure in twentieth-century spirituality.

Simone Weil (1906-1943) was a writer and philosopher who devoted her life to a search for God—while avoiding membership in organized religion. She wrote with the clarity of a brilliant mind educated in the best French schools, the social conscience of a grass-roots labor organizer, and the certainty and humility of a mystic—and she persistently carried out her search in the company of the poor and oppressed.

Robert Coles's study of this strange and compelling figure includes the details of her short, eventful life: her academic career, her teaching, her political and social activism, and her mystical experiences. Coles also analyzes the major themes her life encompassed: her politics, her Jewish identity, her moral concerns, her intellect, and her experience of grace. This is the best, most accessible introduction to the woman who was a spiritual influence on the life and work of so many, among them T. S. Eliot, Flannery O'Connor, Adrienne Rich, and Albert Camus.

Robert Coles, M.D., was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his five-volume Children of Crisis series. He is Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities at Harvard Medical School and the James Agee Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard University, and is the author of many books, including The Spiritual Life of Children, The Moral Life of Children, and Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion.

Sujets

• Religious
• Lettres et linguistique
• Biography
• Autobiography
• Simone Weil

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 11 février 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781594735660
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

SIMONE
WEIL
A MODERN PILGRIMAGE
Robert Coles
With a new foreword by the author
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To Jane,
once more, with love and with thanks
for all the wonderful years,
and with special thanks,
in connection with this project,
for the encouragement, the prodding, the tough criticism,
during those early morning breakfasts.
Contents
Foreword to the SkyLight Lives Edition
Preface
Chronology
1. Introduction to a Life
2. Her Hunger
3. Her Jewishness
4. Her Political Life
5. Her Moral Loneliness
6. A Radical Grace
7. Idolatry and the Intellectuals
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Copyright
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Foreword
Simone Weil was a brilliant, exceedingly complex individual who, though she has been gone from our midst now for over half a century, remains alive today in the thought and work of the writers, teachers, and activists who bear her influence, as well as in all those who struggle, as she did, to discover a faith capable of surviving the demands of both reason and conscience. This book is the result of an effort I made over two decades ago to understand this extraordinary life. The pilgrimage of its subtitle is meant to describe the journey of ideas and ideals, worries and apprehensions that led to this particularly gifted and intensely reflective person s moral and psychological being.
As I read through this new edition, I kept returning in my mind to a conversation I had about Simone Weil in 1965 with Dorothy Day, who, like the poets T. S. Eliot and Adrienne Rich, like the theologian Paul Tillich, like the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, and even like Charles de Gaulle, the great leader of Weil s native country, was someone who would not cease calling upon Simone s words. In the midst of the process of her struggle to make life easier for the poor, Dorothy Day had tried to fathom Simone Weil, and, in her own way, had tried to address her hunger for an acceptable faith. She had also struggled with Weil s religious homelessness, her resolution to stand so significantly alone, at a remove from any of the comfort people derive from membership in churches, synagogues, mosques. She had this to say about her:
She was herself all right-[there was] nobody like her, not back then [when she was alive] and never since! I read her over and over again, each time learning from her, and sometimes getting impatient with her. I just wanted to say: Now Simone, dear, stop making things so hard for yourself, and for all the rest of us who are trying to be your appreciative and affectionate students! Sometimes, I d be in the middle of one of her books, and I would have to look away, stop and think what I think of her, and her mighty mind, her way of reasoning, her fretful, stubborn independence, which challenges the rest of us, more inclined to be conventional, to go along with the principalities and powers, of the Church, if not those of the state or the academy. She was such a loner , though-a fussbudget, my mother would have called her-but a brilliant one who could hit homeruns, run you through all the bases, so you feel worn out by all she s got you to consider, but still you ve traveled a lot, gone quite far, courtesy of that ever-brilliant head of hers, crackling away with original propositions, Hannah Arendt once called them. I can still hear her using those two words-they stopped me in my tracks, the way Simone Weil s words sometimes do. I remember thinking: propositions , that s a nice way of thinking about Weil-she proposed the way a scientist does, but she also addresses you personally , touches your heart the way her own heart was touched by all the things she saw and all the things she wanted to see changed in this world of ours (excuse me, I should add something she d want me to say, this world of God that is ours to try to figure out).
There was a nod of her head, and a deep sigh, as she paused for a minute longer to think about Weil, and also about the Catholic faith they both treasured-though neither of them was a stranger to religious skepticism, nor to the political idealism that scorns religion as a bulwark of the established order. Both of them knew that religious institutions can all too easily become morally compromised, all too distanced from the challenging principles once espoused by Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Amos, and later by Jesus of Nazareth, all of whom challenged the religious establishment of their own days.
That prophetic essence of the Judeo-Christian tradition lived vigorously in Simone Weil-as did the example of Jesus life of teaching, healing, and preaching. She had in her both of those sometimes divergent modes of spiritual avowal. She was no stranger to contradiction, inconsistency, ambiguity. She was, as the reader will see in the forthcoming pages, at once a radical conservative, a conservative radical, a thoroughly distinctive person, one to some extent scientifically sophisticated, and yet one with a decidedly mystical and reverently spiritual side. She was, it can be said, predictably unpredictable-and she is thus a useful figure indeed for us to examine in our own uncertain time.
When Paris fell to the Germans in 1940, she was heard to remark (as an editor friend of mine recently reminded me) that it was a great day for the people of Indochina. There she summarily was: yet again willing and daring to take the longest possible look at things, to stake out her very own take on history, on moral matters, to say truths others preferred to overlook, to broaden perspectives others preferred to narrow or outright ignore. Such a stern, lively, demanding, morally and spiritually awake pilgrim she was-such a gift of fate and chance and circumstance she is to us still. Her modern pilgrimage remains an invaluable source of wide-ranging consideration, and even inspiration, to us who come after her in time s (in nature s, in God s) scheme of things.

Robert Coles
January 2001
Preface
My first encounter with Simone Weil came in 1950, in a college course taught by the late Perry Miller, Classics of the Christian Tradition. On that particular day (a Wednesday noon, I remember), Professor Miller was speaking about Pascal, as well as some French writers in this century who resemble Pascal in one way or another. Simone Weil stood out in this discussion, and he told us, with great enthusiasm, as much as he then knew about her. Little of her work had been published in the United States at that time, though in a couple of years G. P. Putnam would be offering Waiting for God, The Need for Roots , and Gravity and Grace. Professor Miller had learned of her ideas and her writing during the Second World War, and he had tracked down some of her essays. Not much had been published, even in French, yet her legend had been passed along from person to person, in Europe and then in the United States.
I heard of her again when I was in medical school, from Reinhold Niebuhr, who mentioned her, along with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in a course at the Union Theological Seminary. I happened to attend the lecture when her name came up and was struck by Niebuhr s perplexity as he struggled with her obvious brilliance and what he saw as her serious blindspots and confusions. Next, after an interlude of a year s internship and a couple of years of psychiatric residency, I found myself studying child psychiatry and, for diversion, or maybe sanity s sake, taking a seminar with Paul Tillich at Harvard. He brought up Simone Weil and suggested that I read her work, learn what I could about her life, and write the paper required in his course on some aspect of her writing, or perhaps attempt a short biographical essay. Since I read French, I could get at some of her untranslated pieces. Besides, Tillich said, my training would be of help in understanding her life.
The result was my first effort to approach this puzzling, unnerving figure. Her mix of political analysis, religious or moral reflection, and social inquiry-all rendered in a wonderfully lucid and compelling prose-seemed rare, suggestive, and inspiring. Tillich wrote a number of helpful comments on my paper, including a suggestion that I pursue further this interest of mine.
I wasn t sure at the time that I had such an interest! I certainly knew that other concerns had a stronger claim on my time and energy: the completion of child psychiatry training; the fulfillment of an obligation to the military under the old doctors draft law; the personal experience of psychoanalysis, followed by learning its principles in seminars. Still, during those years, whenever I saw the name Simone Weil in print, I paid attention. Gradually I accumulated a rather substantial collection of her writing and of essays written about her. Several times I discussed her with my analyst who, fortunately, wasn t afraid to be interested in religion and religious writers. Those were comfortable, indeed memorable, conversations. He, too, encouraged me to try to figure out, as he once put it, where she was saner than some, and when she was probably a little loony. A nice way, I still think, of regarding her.
The years passed, and as I began to write about my work in the South,