Simone Weil is not a Christian mystic. She’s not Christian period.

Simone Weil is not a Christian mystic. She’s not Christian period. Nor Jewish.

Often called a Christian mystic, nothing could be further from the truth. Wikipedia labels Weil’s “school” as “modern Platonism,” which is only slightly less misleading. Weil developed a post-Christian, post-Western theology in her later work. Lissa McCullough argues that Weil’s universalism can be characterized as religious pragmatism, and that seems about right

Religious conceptions prove their value by their effectiveness in bringing about an attitude of amor fati — perfect humility, obedience, longing for justice, and action that is consistent with the ineluctable truth of finitude and death. (p 236)

Weil was particularly interested in Buddhism.

Weil is a harsh critic of the institutionalized church, likening it to the Great Beast, a collection of egos bent on the sanctification of their satisfaction.

Not your ordinary Christian

The crucifixion of Christ is where force meets submission to force, and submission is made holy. Weil shares this view with several contemporary theologians. God wins by losing, Christ’s power made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9). The incarnation and crucifixion are enough for Weil. Resurrection spoils it; sacrifice not salvation is what religion is all about.

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“The great mystery of life is not suffering but affliction.”

“The great mystery of life is not suffering but affliction.”—Simone Weil

Simone Weil (1909-1943), born Jewish, stood on the edge of converting to Christianity for most of her adult life. Perhaps she was baptized, perhaps not, the evidence is unclear. She is best known as a Christian mystic, though that ignores her very down to earth work, such as her involvement in the trade union movement, and with the international volunteers in Spain. Weil starved herself to death in sympathy with the occupied French. If you think that makes sense, you may stand closer to Weil than you think, closer than you should.

If biography were philosophy, we could dismiss Weil as emotionally disturbed. Disturbed or not, she wrote brilliant essays on a variety of topics. As she grew older, most were about God. It is her essay on “The Love of God and Affliction” that I am concerned with. It’s a brilliant essay, and it’s quite wrong.

The mystery of affliction

What does Weil mean by the mystery of affliction (malheur)? It is not surprising, she says, that the innocent are killed, or that people suffer from disease. Criminals and germs (nature) account for that. But it is surprising that God would have given affliction the power to seize the souls of the innocent and possess them as though they were the worst people on earth.

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Simone Weil and Donald Trump, the world as force and affliction

Simone Weil and Donald Trump, the world as force and affliction.

Simone Weil wrote during the years leading up to the Second World War. She died in 1943. There is much that is curious and troublesome about her life—and death. She died of starvation by her own hand. Born a Jew, Weil is generally regarded as a Christian mystic. Until the end of her life she refused baptism. I see her as a woman with deep insight into the experiences of force and affliction. We all know who Donald Trump is.

“The Iliad, a poem of force,” her most well-known work, addresses the founding document of Western Civilization. Generally seen as an epic of war and heroes, Weil reads it as an account of what force does to people: those who use force, and those who suffer it. It subjects both to the empire of might.

Whoever does not know just how far necessity and a fickle fortune hold the human soul under their domination cannot treat as his equals, nor love as himself, those whom chance has separated from him by an abyss. The diversity of the limitations to which men are subject creates the illusion that there are different species among them which cannot communicate with one another. Only he who knows the empire of might and knows how not to respect it is capable of love and justice. (p. 181)

We live in an age of force, and contempt for those who suffer it. “Loser” has become a common term of abuse. About the concept of a loser, Weil reminds us that Christ was the greatest “loser” of them all. He lost so that we might be saved.

Weil’s is a heretical reading of the New Testament. Christ is the incarnation of God, come to earth to suffer as men and women suffer, and to die as testimony to this fact. The resurrection, so central to Christianity, is unimportant to her.

If the Gospel omitted all mention of Christ’s Resurrection, faith would be easier for me. The Cross by itself suffices me. (Weil, Letter, p. 55)

Resurrection is not important because Christ represents not God’s power, but his willing weakness, a rejection of all who equate God with might. Instead of being a God of might, God is the one who becomes one with the victims of history.

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