WEIL, SIMONE. - Born in Paris in 1909, died in the sanatorium of Ashford in England in 1943, she is a singular figure of thinker and mystic, oriented toward the Christian mystery of the Cross.
A Jew, educated in the school of the radical philosopher Alain, she abandoned teaching and her family to live in absolute dedication the working-class experience in factories and agricultural farms, also taking part in political struggles against totalitarianism. She never embraced the Catholic faith, even though she was always attracted to Christ; indeed she was decidedly opposed to the Church, considering it under a temporal aspect, historicistically, convinced that the intelligence remained enslaved by its dogmas and the spirit was mortified by its discipline. "At the point of intersection between Christianity and all that is not Christian," she had no doctrine, but rather an adventitious metaphysical-theological gnosis with tendencies now Cathar, now Pythagorean, now Platonic, which surfaced in her from the humus of Eastern traditions, particularly Indian: from this mythological world of culture turning to Christ in an exemplary ascetic-mystical search but formally and doctrinally decomposed and therefore isolated in a restless and disturbing immolation outside the Church. She wrote no book, leaving only notebooks of annotations which were, after her death, 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 trans. 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.: Attente de Dieu and La pesanteur et la Grâce; for her working-class experience: Condition ouvrière.
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Benvenuto Matteucci