Embracing Contradictions: Simone Weil's Mystery

This episode is the first of a short series exploring How to Read Simone Weil. The author of Gravity and Grace, The Need for Roots, and Waiting for God—among many other essays, letters, and notes, Weil has been an inspiration to philosophers, poets, priests, and politicians for the last century—almost all of it after her untimely death. 

She understood, perhaps more than many other armchair philosophers from the same period, the risk of philosophy—the demands it made on a human life.

In this series, we’ll feature three guests who look at this magnificent and mysterious thinker in interesting and refreshing, and theologically and morally challenging ways.

We’ll look at Simone Weil the Mystic, Simone Weil the Activist, Simone Weil the Existentialist.

First we’ll be hearing from Eric Springsted, a co-founder of the American Weil Society and its long-time president—who wrote Simone Weil: Late Philosophical Writings and Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century.

In this conversation, Eric O. Springsted and Evan Rosa discuss Simone Weil’s personal biography, intellectual life, and the nature of her spiritual and religious and moral ideas; pursuing philosophy as a way of life; her encounter with Christ, affliction, and mystery; her views on attention and prayer; her concept of the void, and the call to self-emptying; and much more.

About Simone Weil

Simone Weil (1909–1943) was a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist. She’s the author of Gravity and Grace, The Need for Roots, and Waiting for God—among many other essays, letters, and notes.

About Eric O. Springsted

Eric O. Springsted is the co-founder of the American Weil Society and served as its president for thirty-three years. After a career as a teacher, scholar, and pastor, he is retired and lives in Santa Fe, NM. He is the author and editor of a dozen previous books, including Simone Weil: Late Philosophical Writings and Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century.

Show Notes

• Eric O. Springsted’s Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century
• How to get hooked on Simone Weil
• “All poets are exiles.”
• Andre Weil
• Emile Chartier
• Taking ideas seriously enough to impact your life
• Weil’s critique of Marxism: “Reflections on the Cause of Liberty and Social Oppression”:  ”an attempt to try and figure out how there can be freedom and dignity in human labor and action”
• “Unfortunately she found affliction.”
• Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Philosophy is a matter of working on yourself.”
• Philosophy “isn’t simply objective. It’s a matter of personal morality as well.”
• ”Not only is the unexamined life not worth living, but virtue and intellect go hand in hand. Yeah. You don't have one without the other.”
• An experiment in how work and labor is done
• The demeaning and inherently degrading nature of factory work
• Christianity as “the religion of slaves.”
• Christianity can’t take away suffering; but it can take away the meaninglessness.
• George Herbert: “Love bade me welcome / But my soul drew back guilty of dust and sin”
• Weil’s vision/visit of Christ during Holy Week in Solemn, France: “It was like the smile on a beloved face.”
• The role of mystery
• Weil’s definition of mystery:  ”What she felt mystery was, and she gets a definition of it, it's when two necessary lines of thought cross and are irreconcilable, yet if you suppress one of them, somehow light is lost.”
• Her point is that whatever good comes out of this personal contact with Christ, does not erase the evil of the suffering.
• What is “involvement in contradiction”
• “She thought contradiction was an inescapable mark of truth.”
• Contradictions that shed light on life.
• Why mysticism is important for Weil: “The universe cannot be put into a box with techniques or tricks or our own scientific methods or philosophical methods. … Mystery instills humility and it takes the question of the knowing ego out of the picture. … And it challenges modern society to resist the idea that faith could be reduced to a dogmatic system.”
• “Faith is not a matter of the intellect.”
• “Intellect is not the highest faculty. Love is.”
• “The Right Use of School Studies”
• “Muscular effort of attention”
• She wanted to convert her Dominican priest friend into the universality of grace—that Plato was a pre-Chrisitan.” (e.g., her essay, “ Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks”)
• “Grace is universal.”
• How school studies contribute to the love of God
• Prayer as attention
• Weil on Attention: “Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object. It means holding in our minds within the reach of this thought, but on the lower level and not in contact with it. The diverse knowledge we have acquired. Which we are forced to make use of. Above all our thought should be empty waiting, not seeking anything but ready to receive in its naked truth. The object that is to penetrate it.”
• Not “detached,” but “available and ready for use”
• Making space for the afflicted other by “attending” to them
• Love that isn’t compensatory
• “The void as a space where love can go”
• What is prayer for Simone Weil?
• Prayer as listening all night long
• “Voiding oneself of secondary desires and letting oneself be spoken to.”
• Is Simone Weil “ a self-abnegating, melancholy revolutionary” (Leon Trotsky)
• Humility in Simone Weil
• “The Terrible Prayer”
• Was Simone Weil anorexic?
• Refusing comfort on the grounds of solidarity
• Self-emptying and grace
• Accepting the entire creation as God’s will
• Simone Weil on patience and waiting
• “With time, attention blooms into waiting.”
• “She’s resistant to the Church, but drawing from Christ’s self-emptying.”
• God’s withdrawal from the world (which is not deism)
• “A sacramental view of the world”
• “ The very creation of the world is by this withdrawal and simultaneous crucifixion of the sun in time and space.”
• (Obsessive) pursuit of purity in morals and thought
• Iris Murdoch’s The Nice and the Good
• “Nothing productive needs to come from this effort.”
• “ She put her finger on what's really the heart of Christian spirituality. … We live by the Word … by our being open to listening to the Word and having that transformed into God’s word.”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Eric O. Springsted
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Emily Brookfield, Alexa Rollow, Zoë Halaban, & Kacie Barrett
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give