Simone Weil's Reformation

by Rose Lyddon

This essay appears in Issue 5 of the Mars Review of Books. Visit the MRB store here.

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The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Obligations Towards the Human Being

by Simone Weil

Penguin Classics, 288 pp, $16.99

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In her pre-war notebook, written between 1933 and 1939, Simone Weil wrote “you could not have wished to have been born at a better time than this, when everything has been lost.” Everything—for her, an unusual imprecision. What has been lost?

In her London notebook, written in 1943—the year of her death—Weil gave a partial answer: “When humanity fell away from a civilization illumined by faith, probably the first thing it lost was the spirituality of labour.” This is the animating theme of The Need for Roots, written over those same months. Simone Pétrement, Weil’s friend and biographer, believed that all of Weil’s London writings belonged to the period between December 1942 and April 1943, when she was admitted to the hospital. Over those four months, she wrote The Need for Roots, essays including ‘What is sacred in every human being?,’ ‘Are we fighting for justice?,’ ‘Essential ideas for a New Constitution,’ ‘This War is a War of Religions,’ ‘On the Abolition of All Political Parties,’ ‘Is there a Marxist Doctrine?’, ‘Theory of Sacraments,’ ‘Concerning the Colonial Problem in its Relation to the Destiny of the French People,’ ‘Notes on Cleanthes, Pherecydes, Anaximander, and Philolaus,’ as well as extensive notebooks, translations of the Upanishads and extensive correspondence, the last continued from her hospital bed until her death in August, 1943. This is a partial list, provided usefully in the introduction by Kate Kirkpatrick to the new Penguin translation of The Need for Roots. “Did she sleep?” asks Kirkpatrick.

Kirkpatrick’s introduction, which unenviably follows T.S. Eliot’s preface to Arthur Wills’s translation published by Routledge & Kegan Paul in 1952, is valuable primarily for setting Weil’s long, strange book in the immediate context of its production. There is biographical information: It was written in the Mayfair offices of the Fighting France movement in the first months of 1943. It details her contacts with André Philip, the Minister of the Interior for de Gaulle’s government-in-exile, who had given a lecture in New York calling for a new declaration of human rights, which would be a ‘profession of faith’—Weil had attended the lecture before being interviewed by Philip for a job at the Commissariat for the Interior in London. Weil’s relationship to and criticism of personalism, a philosophy particularly associated with Catholic intellectual Jacques Maritain, is discussed, as is the work’s complicated relationship with the development of a post-war consensus on universal human rights. This sort of solid intellectual history is particularly welcome with figures like Weil, whose esotericism often allows them to float above history as quasi-prophets. The popularity of Gravity and Grace, the usual entry point to Weil’s corpus, has compounded this problem, being composed of selected extracts from her extensive notebooks with no sense of their dates, context, or interrelation. Her work is often epigrammatic and paradoxical, but she wrote far more frequently in paragraphs than readers of Gravity and Grace would presume. An introduction which deals with biography, intellectual context, and philosophical influences is therefore welcome.

Eliot’s preface worried not at all about such details. It remains, however, good psychological preparation for reading Weil. He is mostly concerned with her character and what it might have to do with her method and what both, in turn, might have to do with what she is saying (posthumously) to Western civilization in the eye-blink of its rebuilding. Kirkpatrick mischaracterizes Eliot when she says he “dismisses” The Need for Roots as “‘prolegomena to politics’ whose author was a genius but whose message is fit for limited consumption by the young and idealistic.” Eliot used “prolegomena to politics” not as a statement of genre; he was simply describing The Need for Roots as the sort of work which politicians would seldom read and would not understand if they did. This was a failing of the political and intellectual establishment, not a limitation of Weil’s. For Eliot, the young and not-yet-settled were best-placed to understand what Weil’s work—indeed, her whole life—sought to communicate: some glimmer of beauty that might enter the soul at the right time and transform it. The Need for Roots would not offer any benefit whatsoever on a political theory reading list. It is a book to be encountered and re-encountered when the reader is disposed to understand it. It requires that particular Weilian virtue: attention, which is nothing less than the capacity to let your entire being be transformed by an encounter with something beautiful and true. Eliot understood Weil’s aesthetic method; like her, he clung to tradition as something far more powerful than nostalgic window-dressing. Tradition could communicate where all other words and forms failed; similarly, form could destroy an idea if presented improperly, preventing it from ever being digested and understood. Weil’s soul was shattered open by George Herbert’s “Love (III).” She knew that the most important political question was how the soul of a peasant could be saved as his body worked and his mind recalled some line from Piers Plowman or a Gospel parable about a sower. These questions do not belong comfortably to modern political theory.

The Need for Roots is full of strange proposals. Weil suggested, as a remedy to industrial alienation, a return to traditional apprenticeships and the Tour de France, lasting until a man was ready to settle down. Then, provided he passed an intelligence test, he would be given a plot of land and machinery for a small workshop to support his family. She suggested to Charles de Gaulle that French nurses be parachuted to the frontlines to heal the wounded, conspicuously risking their lives to demonstrate moral superiority over the merciless Germans and thereby win an aesthetic victory. Charles de Gaulle believed her mad. Undeterred, she wrote a diagnosis of modern civilization and some suggestions as to how the situation might be fixed. Modern civilization, she argued, “is sick from not knowing exactly what place to give to physical labour and those who perform it.” The remedy is a civilization based on the spirituality of work. Why work, specifically? In Genesis, she argued, man excluded himself from obedience. “As punishments, God has chosen work and death. Consequently, work and death, if a man consents to suffer them, constitute a vehicle for attaining the supreme good which is obedience to God.”

Quoting Mein Kampf, Weil highlighted Hitler’s view that “a fundamental law of necessity reigns throughout the whole of Nature and that [humanity’s] existence is subject to the law of eternal struggle and strife.” Weil would not have disagreed—she made the same argument in her commentary on the Iliad (“The Iliad, or The Poem of Force”). The miracle of the Iliad is in laying bare this law: “in this poem there is not a single man who does not at one time or another have to bow his neck to force.” Nobody is exempt—she echoed Hobbes when she wrote that the “strong are . . . never absolutely strong; nor are the weak absolutely weak.” Each person is subject to the blunt force of necessity, which is the order of creation. For Hitler, as for Nietzsche, ontological necessity laid the foundation for a Realpolitik wherein the strong legitimately rule over the weak. For Weil, it led in the opposite direction. The Greek genius begun with the Iliad concluded with the Gospels. In the Incarnation and Passion, Christ consented to become subject to necessity and emptied Himself to the extent that God was cut off from God—a geometry of atonement. This geometry is the mechanism by which human nature (which is finite and natural) can come to know God (who is the absolute Good, wholly transcendent). This is the lynchpin of existence—the meeting place of necessity and grace. Weil thought of necessity as a gift left by God so that each soul might learn obedience. The imitation of Christ is exactly this becoming obedient to necessity.

When Weil spoke of a spirituality of labor, she did not mean that work should become painless or even pleasant. She spoke contemptuously of the Roman passiones where martyrs embraced death joyfully, as if grace could grant them the protection from suffering which had not been granted to Christ. Civilization had lost a spirituality of work (a loss which Weil dates to the decline of the medieval guild system) when it became “a means to an end: money.” Wage slavery negated the consent of the worker and thus denied work its spiritual value. “Labour is consent to the order of the universe,” she wrote in her London notebook. In The Need for Roots, she argued that “after freely chosen death, freely chosen physical work is the most perfect form of obedience.” But whereas consent to death is theoretical and abstract until the moment when death arrives, “physical work is a daily death.” Consenting to labor is a spiritual discipline which, day in and day out, increases the proportion of good relative to evil within the human soul. The worker does not need to love his work—he only needs to understand its value so as to be able to consent to its necessity.

Why should the body be necessary to this transformation? This is what separates Weil from the Gnostics and from Descartes. In her essay “Theory of Sacraments,” possibly the last she wrote before her admission to the hospital in April 1943, she asks: “But with the movements and stances of the body able to have objects only here below, how then could this desire [for absolute good; that is, for God] have a passage into the state of reality through the flesh?” She answers: “In order that desire for absolute good pass through the flesh, an object here below must be the absolute good in relation to the flesh, as a sign and by convention.” What follows is a careful and delicate argument, clearer than many of her earlier writings (as if illumined). She argued that when the sacraments are received with a desire for contact with God, belief becomes productive of reality—becomes faith. Faith is the operative consent which allows the good to enter us. From this, Weil concludes that “[c]onsent is only real at the moment when the flesh makes it so by a bodily movement.”

A sacrament is an arrangement that corresponds in a flawless, perfect, way to the dual character of the operation of grace, suffered and consented at the same time, and to the relation of human thought to flesh.

Weil illustrates this essay with parables involving agricultural laborers (in The Need for Roots, she abhors liturgical centralization and recommends that priests in rural parishes focus their preaching particularly on these, so that parishioners internalize a connection between their daily work and the work of salvation). She makes a further connection between sacramental activity and the motionless attention of the soul, which is patience. Obedience, consent, attention, necessity, grace—the full extent of Weil’s thought comes together here. Read together with The Need for Roots, written at the same time or within months of each other, it amounts to a sacramental theory of labor.

In The Need for Roots, Weil wrote that the “particular mission, the vocation of our era, is the constitution of a civilization based on the spirituality of work.” Aspects of this idea, she says, are found in “Rousseau, George Sand, Tolstoy, Proudhon, Marx, in papal encyclicals and elsewhere.” These are “the only original thoughts of our time, the only ones we have not borrowed from the Greeks.” Her understanding of historiography is materialist in the sense that the conditions of a particular historical moment produce the ideas to remedy it—so the greatest degree of uprootedness produces a theory of civilization built on the spirituality of work, which would be ‘the highest degree of rootedness.’ Her thought is always geometrical; this is not the Hegelian Aufhebung. It is the Cross—the meeting of necessity and grace at the center of the universe, a crucifixion of creation. The Cross is the supernatural piercing of materialism. It is the only point of contact between the created world and the transcendent.

The great catastrophe of Western civilization was not the French Revolution or the Enlightenment, as many of her contemporaries believed. Rather, it was the destruction of Languedoc culture in the 12th and 13th centuries. The Romanesque, not the Gothic, was the high point of Christian civilization—the unpolluted beauty of Gregorian chant, Romanesque arches, and Christian Neoplatonism, which she believed may have carried traces of ancient Thracian mystery cults. It is interesting, therefore, that Weil does not make the link between the spirituality of work and Benedictine monasticism. In 1938, she had spent Holy Week and Easter at the Benedictine abbey of Solesmes. She was suffering from intense headaches, which would worsen and interfere with her work over the coming years. Nevertheless, she attended the daily offices, where the beauty of the nuns’ ancient chant allowed the thought of the Passion of Christ to “enter into [her] being once and for all.” Had she read the Rule of St. Benedict, where St. Benedict had set down a rhythm of days filled with prayer and manual labor? “When they live by the labor of their hands, as our fathers and the apostles did, then they are really monks,” he had written. The spirituality of labor is not, as she rightly pointed out, a Greek idea. But neither does it belong to modernity; it is as old as Christian civilization.

“Rootedness is perhaps the most important and least known human spiritual need,” writes Weil. “A human being is rooted through their real, active and natural participation in the life of a collectivity that keeps alive the treasures of the past and has aspirations for the future.” That these roots ought to be natural is central—Christian civilization can’t be imposed. Post-war reconstruction could not proceed by the enforcement of certain values and institutions. This was everything that Weil detested in the inquisitorial strain of Catholicism which had obliterated her beloved Languedoc culture. This method could only produce uprootedness. Uprooted people uproot people, her dictum prophetically goes. And yet it was necessary for the French people to have contact with their past, which was necessarily a Christian past. The future could only be based on “the treasures inherited from the past and digested, absorbed and recreated by us. Of all the needs of the human soul, there is none more vital than the past.”

As a historian, Weil is a delight. She is a fierce absolutist, demolishing the achievements of the Roman Empire (‘The Great Beast’) like an anti-Dante, clinging to the Greeks, condemning the ‘Hebraic tradition’ to an extent that even her Jewishness has not protected her from accusations of anti-semitism. She was always for the underdog, the troubadour, the unlettered Germanic tribesman whose ritual was snuffed out by a totalitarian Rome. Something as cold as a State cannot be loved—the patriot loves his culture, compatriots, landscape, music, poetry; he loves a set of traditions, lovingly passed down by generations of compatriots. But in modernity States have eaten up the past so that there is nothing left; people have become French, forgotten to be Breton. They have been uprooted. Totalitarianism, what Weil names frequently in her writings as ‘The Great Beast,’ will draw in those who have been uprooted. The spirituality of work is “the only thing big enough to offer to people instead of totalitarian idols. If it is not offered to them in such a way as to make them feel its greatness, they will remain in thrall to the idol.” Writing during the Second World War, Weil saw a great hunger that could only be sated by greatness, whether this be the false greatness of conquest or real greatness, which is of a spiritual order.

How, then, to communicate this? There could be no war propaganda to spur a spiritual transformation of France. Weil began with what she knew, having spent much of her life teaching in (brutally secularist) French state education. “If children are not accustomed to thinking of God, they will become fascists or Communists out of a need to give themselves to something,” she says in The Need for Roots. This does not mean that children must believe in God. Rather, being accustomed to thinking about God means one is accustomed to thinking with the great artistic and intellectual tradition which Christianity shaped in the West. She argues that it’s ludicrous for children to have read Pascal and Lamartine and even Dante and Milton but never opened the Bible. Children should be taught doctrine—as a part of their history, the world of ideas into which they grow. “Above all,” she stresses, this teaching “would seek to make children aware of the beauty it contains.” She goes on:

Contact with Christian beauty, presented simply as beauty to be savoured, would subtly instil spirituality into the mass population, if the country is capable of it, far more effectively than any dogmatic teaching of religious beliefs. The word beauty in no way implies that religious matters should be considered in the manner if aesthetes. Their worldview is sacrilegious. It consists in treating beauty as entertainment, manipulating at it and gazing at it. Beauty is something that is consumed; it is sustenance.

Here is the core of Weil’s program, method and form—the form of her whole life, maybe, lived just outside the Church so as to draw people into it, lived in such extremes as to draw the attention of generation after generation. The form of her writing, its paradoxes and infuriating overstatements and allusive links. Her work has a Straussian quality, hiding its deepest insights between the lines, seeking a form which will convey ideas too dangerous and easily misunderstood to be stated blankly. Indeed, she sounds like Leo Strauss when she says (of propagandistic mottos) that “to discredit such words by throwing them into the public domain without infinite precautions would do irreparable harm and kill any hope that the corresponding thing might appear.” For Weil’s vision—that is, a civilization based on the spirituality of work—to succeed, the idea must gradually seep into people’s minds. These minds already know “that we are suffering from an imbalance due to a purely material development of technology.” The best way to awaken comprehension is to ensure that, in the course of an education, each child encounters the spiritual treasures of their past—the bright genius of minds gone before them, sharing the same land, the same sorts of lives. “There is no other process for learning about the human heart than the study of history combined with life experience, in such a way as they shed light on each other,” she writes.

Her historiographical method is apophatic—this is why she is so attracted to the adjudged heretics and lost love songs of Languedoc, which she returns to again and again as the moment when Christian civilization almost flourished but then was crushed by another manifestation of the Great Beast. “History is a fabric of baseness and cruelty among which a few drops of purity occasionally glimmer . . . . We must seek, if we can, indirect testimonies . . . . To love France, we need to feel it has a past, but we must not love the historical shell of that past. We must love the part that is mute, anonymous, vanished.” (What I would give to tell Simone that one of the most vicious debates in contemporary British historiography is whether the Cathars did or did not, in fact, exist.)

To restore the lost poetry of labor . . . Weil turns to history as the remedy for alienation. The alienated worker is uprooted and, at worst, his soul mangled into affliction. The worker whose work is valuable, dignified, which stands in a tradition (which is a trade), which has its songs and poems . . . then “the suffering that is always related to some extent to the exertion of work becomes the pain that makes the beauty of the world penetrate to the human being’s very core.” This experience cannot be taught. But the economic and cultural environment can be so arranged that such sanctification is possible. In an essay “Concerning the Colonial Problem in its Relation to the Destiny of the French People,” Weil wrote: “it is only the radiance from the spiritual treasures of the past that can induce in the soul that state which is the necessary condition for receiving grace . . . . The loss of the past is equivalent to the loss of the supernatural.”

In another essay, “This war is a war of religions,” Weil wrote that while the nature of mystical transformation makes it inaccessible for the mass of believers, nevertheless “the whole life of an entire people can be infused with a religion that would be entirely oriented towards the mystical.” She says, furthermore, “it is not a new Franciscan order that is required. A monk’s habit or a monastery is a separation. These people have to be in the midst of the masses and touch them without anything intervening.” This is strikingly close to a comment by philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre when asked about Rod Dreher’s popular prescription for Christian life, The Benedict Option, which had been influenced by the closing words of MacIntyre’s landmark After Virtue. “What is very interesting about St Benedict,” he said, “is that he quite inadvertently created a new set of social forms.” MacIntyre explained—it’s worth finding the whole thing and reading it from him—that monks, necessarily, can’t reproduce themselves, so have to exist in close symbiotic relationships with nearby villages. The villages supply novices and exchange goods; over time, the monastery becomes a local centre for education, literary production, pastoral care, etc. “So this is not a withdrawal from society . . . . When I said we need a new St Benedict, I was suggesting we need a new kind of engagement with the social order, not any kind of withdrawal from it.”

Why this moment, when everything has been lost? Weil understood that there would be a brief window after the war when the architecture of civilization could be reinvented (as it was; one wonders what the world would look like today if the architects had been not modernists but converts to the Romanesque). Weil’s apophaticism made her hopeful in ways that realist political thinkers never can be. The cross can’t be dislodged. Grace and necessity meet at the gates of hell. Then, as now, there is no politician willing to take such risks. But culture and aesthetics are ever-expanding mission ground.