WEIL, SIMONE. – Born in Paris in 1909 and deceased at the sanatorium of Ashford in England in 1943, she was a singular figure of a thinker and mystic, oriented toward the Christian mystery of the Cross.
A Jew, educated at the school of the radical philosopher Alain, she abandoned teaching and her family in order to live out, in absolute dedication, the experience of the working class in factories and on farms, also participating in political struggles against totalitarianism. She never embraced the Catholic faith, although she was always attracted to Christ; indeed, she was decidedly opposed to the Church, considering it from a temporal, historicist standpoint, convinced that intelligence remained enslaved by its dogmas and that the spirit was mortified by its discipline. “At the point of intersection between Christianity and everything that is not Christian,” she had no doctrine, but rather an adventitious metaphysical-theological gnosis, at times Cathar, at times Pythagorean, at times Platonic, which emerged in her from the humus of Eastern traditions, particularly Indian ones: from this mythological world of culture she turned toward Christ in an exemplary ascetic-mystical quest, but one formally and doctrinally disintegrated and therefore isolated in a troubled and troubling immolation outside the Church. She wrote no book, leaving only notebooks of observations that, after her death, were published under the care of her friends Gustave Thibon and J. M. Perrin, a Dominican, and also by A. Camus: La pesanteur et la Grâce (1948, Italian translation Milan 1951), L'enracinement (1949), Attente de Dieu (1950), Lettres à un religieux (1950), La connaissance surnaturelle (1951), Cahiers (1951), Intuitions prédictives (1951), La condition ouvrière (1951). Fundamental texts for a religious study of W. are Attente de Dieu and La pesanteur et la Grâce; for her experience as a worker: Condition ouvrière.
BIRL.: J. M. Perrin-G. Thibon, S. W. telle que nous l'avons connue, Paris 1952; M. Moré, La pensée religieuse de S. W., in Dieu vivant, 17 (1932), pp. 37-68; S. Fruscione, Il peccato di esistere in S. W., in Civ. Catt., 1952, II, pp. 336-68; id., La tirannia della Chiesa in S. W., ibid., 1952, III, pp. 53-65; B. Matteucci, Incontro con S. W., in Humanitas, 8 (1953), pp. 113-35. Benvenuto Matteucci