Simone Weil, a French philosopher and mystic, was born in Paris in 1909 and passed away in Ashford, Kent, England, in 1943, and was a complex, fascinating woman. She came from a secular Jewish home and was never baptised, but she considered herself a Christian — a non-committed Catholic, to be more precise. She was a pacifist, but fought in the Spanish Civil War. She was an intellectual, but was known for her anti-intellectualism. She came from a bourgeois family, but worked on a French assembly line for a year. She loved life, but yearned for her death.
In the spring of 1937, she experienced a religious ecstasy in the same church where St. Francis of Assisi had prayed, which led her to pray for the first time in her life. She had another, even more powerful revelation a year later and from that moment on her writings became more mystical. During World War II, she lived for a time in Marseille and received spiritual direction from a Dominican friar. Around this time she met Gustave Thibon, the French Catholic writer who later edited her work. Weil was also deeply interested in other religious traditions — for instance, Hinduism and Buddhism.
Here are some of her resonant sayings:
A doctrine serves no purpose in itself, but it is indispensable to have one if only to avoid being deceived by false doctrines.
A science which does not bring us nearer to God is worthless.All sins are attempts to fill voids.An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God.Charity. To love human beings in so far as they are nothing. That is to love them as God does.Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him.Equality is the public recognition, effectively expressed in institutions and manners, of the principle that an equal degree of attention is due to the needs of all human beings.Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.Every time that I think of the crucifixion of Christ, I commit the sin of envy.Evil, when we are in its power, is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, even a duty.Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace.Humility is attentive patience.In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.It is an eternal obligation toward the human being not to let him suffer from hunger when one has a chance of coming to his assistance.It is only the impossible that is possible for God. He has given over the possible to the mechanics of matter and the autonomy of his creatures.Life does not need to mutilate itself in order to be pure.One cannot imagine St. Francis of Assisi talking about rights.Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work.The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation.To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.To set up as a standard of public morality a notion which can neither be defined nor conceived is to open the door to every kind of tyranny.To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art or life.Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link.We can only know one thing about God — that he is what we are not. Our wretchedness alone is an image of this. The more we contemplate it, the more we contemplate him.Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.When once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder.
