Saint of the Undecided

THE NOTEBOOKS OF SIMONE WEIL (2 Vols., 648 pp.)--Translated by Arthur Wills--Putnam ($10).

How does one get the reputation of a saint in the 20th century? Outside the Roman Catholic Church, where such things are regulated with almost civil-service precision, saintly works are not enough, and miracles are not required. What seems to be necessary is a sort of rapport with the time's intellectual torments, a capacity for drilling and painfully hitting some universal nerve. That, apparently, is the special gift of Simone Weil, a Frenchwoman who died in 1943 at 34 and who has since been informally canonized as a "saint of the churchless," a "patron of the undecided."

Her life has already become something of a legend, encrusted in contradictions. As a Jew, she fulminated against Judaism. As a Christian, she could never bring herself to join any church (she was most drawn to Roman Catholicism). Born of a well-to-do Jewish agnostic family, she was barely five when she refused to eat sugar because French front-line soldiers in World War I were deprived of it. At 14, she dispensed with socks because the children of the poor could not wear them. As a young schoolteacher, she flirted with Marxism. To "understand" the workingman, she took a job as factory hand in an auto plant ("a decision fundamentally silly, the illusion of the Vassar girl of all lands," as one critic put it). Although she fell ill with pleurisy, she enlisted with the Spanish Loyalists, vowing never to use the gun she was issued. Before she died in England during World War II, she starved herself by refusing, though weak and ill, to eat more than the wartime food ration allotted her countrymen in France.

But what has attracted attention to Simone Weil, more than her sometimes foolish, sometimes heroic life, is her inner struggle, on which she reported in books such as Waiting for God, Gravity and Grace. Her Notebooks, now published in English for the first time, are probably the most personal account of that struggle. If some of the jottings in these two volumes make her seem like the lead scout of the troubled lost battalion of agnosticism, many more confirm a rare and remarkable religious vocation.

Destruction of the "I." Above all, like all mystics, she hoped to transcend self. "We possess nothing in this world--for chance may deprive us of everything--except the power to say 'I.' It is that which has to be offered up to God, that is to say, destroyed." In common with other mystics, Simone Weil skirts the dilemma of how a totally effaced self can remain sentient enough to experience the ineffable joy of its oneness with God, in the rare event that it should be achieved. Simone Weil's own most telling religious experience: "a presence more personal, more certain, more real, than that of a human being, though inaccessible to the senses and imagination." It came when she was idly repeating to herself some lines from the English metaphysical Poet George Herbert: "'You must sit down,' says Love, 'and taste my meat.' So I did sit and eat."

The belief that God created man "in His own image" was apparently alien to Simone Weil, who could not see why God, who is infinite, should create something "that is outside himself, that is not himself." The only way to bridge the contradiction, she felt, was through Christ on the Cross. "It is not by eating the fruit of a certain tree, as Adam thought, that one becomes the equal of God, but by going the way of the Cross." It is perhaps not too far-fetched to suggest that Simone Weil's obsession with becoming "the equal of God" was, on its less attractive side, a form of spiritual social-climbing, and that her willful, lifelong pursuit of wretchedness was the age-old sin of pride in the paradoxical guise of a bitter humility, that of wishing to be crucified in a surrogate Crucifixion.

A Passion for Purity. That she should wish to do so out of mere self-hatred is not inconceivable either, for at one point, she writes: "I cannot conceive the possibility of God loving me, when I feel so clearly that even the affection which human beings evince for me can only be a mistake on their part." Yet she was not incapable of self-analysis, and at one point duels shrewdly with Freud: "To reproach mystics with loving God by means of the faculty of sexual love is as though one were to reproach a painter with making pictures by means of colors composed of material substances. We haven't anything else with which to love ... The whole of Freudian doctrine is saturated with the very prejudice which he makes it his mission to combat, namely, that everything that is sexual is base."

The orthodox have always been a little leery of Simone Weil, and with some reason. The Notebooks, chockablock with the ritual lore of a dozen sects and faiths, show that she was deeply preoccupied with Dionysus, Osiris, Buddha and Plato as well as Christ. She applauds continually the Greek ideals of harmony, measure, proportion and order. Yet she herself burns with a passion for the Absolute, and the Hellenic "nothing in excess" is precisely the law she could not live by. Her grandeur, as well as her absurdity, it has been pointed out, is that she shares the apocalyptic vision of the Old Testament prophets with their incandescent fervor and their rare and terrible purity. Simone Weil embarrasses, as a saint embarrasses, by her childlike refusal to deviate from her personal vision of the pure, the good, and the godly, wherever they might lead. "It's a lucky thing for all of us," a friend once told her, "that you are not God!"

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